Henri Reynard Speaks Out

Cleaning Out Corruption

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The truth about corrupt practices in government today is that corruption here is not our citizens' only responsibility. Today any corruption in Iraq belongs to us, and will as long as we are a significant force in that nation's life. When you break a society with war, corruption usually follows. Corruption in Iraq is running away with the values of Islamic love for humanity tucked in the bag slung over its shoulder. Corruption is running away with the strong sense of honesty that is essential in this largely Christian society too. We are lying to one another and to ourselves a lot today here in the USA. Lying is one symptom of a really corrupt mind, failing to recognize reality is another.

Corruption is rooted in misuse of power and has many faces. Men or women who use the power of their political office as a means to seduce the young people on their staff are guilty of one type of corruption. Selling the power of your office to your financial supporters is another variety of corruption. The power conferred by high office itself is among the great corrupters of human values and destroyers of human integrity. Adulation is a great corrupter of values; based on its ability to convince us that the merit in our life lays not in our actions but in ourselves. Corruption is, of course, an extremely judgmental word, and to call someone corrupt is placing a harsh judgment upon them. Nation's can become corrupt, but not without the complicity or at a minimum the tolerance of the people who live there. Governments' innate probability of becoming corrupt at one level or another is one of the best documented traits of organized human society.

We live at a level of organization that is unprecedented in all of history. Our world and the societies in it are organized along familial, social, economic, political, legal and religious lines that cross national boundaries everywhere. The interconnections between people of different nations exceed those at any other time in human history. Corruption of values anywhere in the world inevitably makes that network of human interconnections less stable. Law, religion, social doctrine, economic policies, politics, are all too easily corrupted by venal individuals in positions of power. These value systems are sometimes even great corrupters of one another. Human actions spreading a powerful belief held in one religion, into the realm of law can corrupt the law. Our founders were among the first who recognized that religion could corrupt the values of law in society.

The idea of separating church and state was one of the great inventions of the founding fathers of this nation. It has usually reduced corruption in our nation below levels that are impossible to reach where the two are joined. Corruption always occurs where religion is used to dominate the political debate and hide real corruption underneath the skirts of a church. History teaches us that if we bother to read it without becoming engaged from the point of view given to us by our own religion. Religions that can use the power of the state to punish people for their "sins"; and states that can make "sin" punishable by law are corrupt. Both move from excess to corruption rapidly when humans in them are corrupted by the amount of power available in such a system. Decoupling the two was an attempt to reduce the level of control both had in our lives. The founders also believed in the innate good of humanity. Our current leaders appear to have doubts about that innate good.

Improving our lives is the point of both our religion and government. Religion is there in part to improve how we behave toward one another. God is not constructed of raw power in our New Testament, but of mercy and compassion. It is increasingly the Old Testament that is quoted by the religious people here who call themselves conservative today. Many of them believe that it is their duty to change our laws to coincide with their religious faith. Thus they vote for those who declaim their love of God and their faith as part of their drive for political office. They assume that the faith filled candidate will avoid corruption by living as their faith dictates.

Conservatism today has recently come to be associated with the idea that the power to control individuals' choices must reside more with some level of government and less with the individual. It is truly amazing to me that liberals are berating the Patriot Act and conservatives are supporting it. It is as if conservatives believe that government can keep us from being corrupt by using its power in our lives. Since when is that a conservative belief? The "War on Drugs" is a symptom of this strange development in our society. Conservatives are supporting that war which has become a corrupter of government at every level. Prohibition of drug use has never worked in human history against any broadly used substance, and it is not working here.

Election fraud is likely to be at an all time high if we use the electronic voting systems that are being implemented around the nation today. A great book on that problem just came into my house; "Black Box Voting" is the title. I recommend it if you care how the basic right to vote and have your vote counted is being corrupted by these machines. Programming was one of my careers. The parts of this book I have read have unnerved me entirely about the use of these machines as they are currently being implemented. Corruption of the laws supporting the voting rights of our citizens threatens this nation's very existence. The attempts to create Democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan are filled with irony when our own vote counting process is so corrupt. God bless and keep you alert to corruption here while we are cleaning up corruption there.