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America, we can be better than this

When I became a journalist in the 1960s and traveled overseas, the attitudes toward the United States were uniformly admiring. We had, after all, won World War II against two vicious adversaries, but it was more than that. America was looked up to for its fantastic research facilities, for its great university system, for its workable democratic politics and for its almost uniformly friendly people. It was in the '70s that all of this began to change and led us to today when we are perceived as "Murder Inc."

We all feel it. Actually, we all see it, day after day. Schools are shot up by maniacal misfits; our military are targets everywhere; formerly respected policemen are looked upon as trigger-happy (at best) as one African American young man after another is shot and killed for dubious reasons. All the big cities are beset by inner-city gang violence, but Baltimore has now become the apex of the 2015 experience. Only last weekend, 11 people were shot, two dying, and the city ended this July with a record 45 homicides. It has gotten so bad that the feds have moved in to try to aid the Baltimore police.

Then, on top of this, an idiot dentist (of all things) from Minnesota (of all places) goes to Zimbabwe and tortures, shoots, kills, and then skins and beheads one of the most regal lions still existing in the world. Even more, the lion was a local and international favorite, named Cecil, who lived in a "protected" nature preserve and was widely beloved.

The only good news is that Zimbabwe is pursuing the extradition of Dr. Walter Palmer, and that Zimbabwe is a particularly corrupt government. Good luck! The bad news is that this killing has created even more dislike for America, making people wonder who the real beast of the jungle is.

All of this also makes America irrelevant, for to be truly admired and followed, the leader of the world or of an empire must be moral and stable. Anne Applebaum, the well-informed foreign correspondent of The Washington Post in Europe, recently commented on TV how, at European dinner parties, nobody talks about America much anymore or wonders what it will do.

We all know this, don't we? Of course we do. We see the shootings on television every day or read about them in the papers. Cecil has become a cause celebre. But we are simply asking "why?" instead of demanding "WHY?"

A summit of police chiefs from all over the country met in Washington last week. District of Columbia Police Chief Cathy Lanier, the organizer, commented, "We have not seen what we're seeing right now in decades!" The group, not surprisingly, blamed the prevalence of guns and the propensity to use drugs.

But I think that the more amorphous reasons for the violence are equally guilty. There is an atmosphere - a mood - hanging over the country that cries out for attention, even as its complexities baffle the most fruitful minds.

First, the wars. To me, the decline of American morals began after World War II when we allowed the success of the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Germany and Japan into democracies to lead us into the Vietnam War, which was neither wise nor winnable.

What's more, we used horrific weapons in Vietnam, such as Agent Orange, which has now come back to haunt us, and that rightly shocked the American populace. Perhaps they were no worse than weapons used in World War II, but the reasons for our involvement in Vietnam seemed false, which made us come out looking little better than lesser countries.

When this was followed by invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with massive bombings of Baghdad and the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Americans' faith in their country catapulted still further down.

But there are other indications of decline. Look at our culture. Look at the difference between movies made in the World War II era and those of today full of often needless violence. I have noted that, in the last few years, there has been a multitude of burned bodies, headless corpses and cut-up bodies on television. How long before Cecil the lion will be so "feted"?

There is no question that our police need better training to stop shooting to kill, but there is also little question that it is the gangs in our inner cities that are going to become an ever greater part of the problem, even while their educated brothers are thriving.

In short, let's start to re-moralize America. Let's be better than we are.

Georgie Anne Geyer can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

© 2015 UNIVERSAL

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