If we the people of the United States of America allow the actions of our leaders to bring calamitous distress and affliction upon us, we too, even though not the culprits, are co-conspirators with them in the administration of injustice and inhumaneness.

We cannot escape the boomerang effects of our actions!

People so seldom realize that when they give their national leaders carte blanche authorization to do good or evil, to apply domestic and foreign policies that are designed to abuse some fellow-Americans and peoples of other nations they, by their permission granted, sow to the wind seeds of destructiveness in a whirlwind or hurricane.

The "Law of Retribution" is no less exacting than the "Law of Gravity." Even though the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, sometimes ever so slowly, it does come full circle. As we sow, we shall reap.

Just as "an unexamined life is not worth living," an unexamined nation is not worthy to be a nation deserving of honor, even if it perceives of herself as being the world's superpower. When we blindly, naively or, out of pseudonational pride, support our national leaders without requiring them to "do justly and love mercy," we commit, what has to be, the eighth deadly sin, choosing to do evil rather than to do good and knowingly or unknowingly we become participants in the "axis of evil."

So when I question the conduct of our national leaders and refuse to endorse their inhumane domestic and foreign policies that I know will promote divisiveness, favor one group or nation over another, it is not because I, a veteran of the Korean War, am unpatriotic or unAmerican, only that in my heart I know we are all children of one Creator and that we were created to be one people and the members of one family whose residence is the World House that we call Planet Earth.

It is perfectly clear to me that people are no less responsible for the conduct of their national leaders than these leaders themselves. If we allow the actions of our leaders to bring calamitous distress and affliction upon us and maybe upon future generations, we too, even though not the culprits, are co-conspirators with them in the administration of injustice and inhumaneness.

Kindness, not wealth, military might or a super-power complex obsessiveness, is our greatest possession. Nothing else comes close! It is our superior weapon or, more correctly, compassion, that we can express individually and as a nation to win friends and encourage people, as we influence nations, to do likewise. So hencforth let us mass-administer and, most importantly, practice kindness and require the same of our national leaders. It is kind to be kind! And besides, it is in our own self-interest and that of our children, their children and their yet unborn descendants to be kind.

(The legacy of slavery in America is just one example of how the inhumane practices of people of an earlier era than ours can perpetually fester and reap havoc upon a nation many generations after their commital of evil livingness.)

Choose you this day what is good and right. Do the lovely thing.

Copyright 2003 by Uriah J. Fields