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The Tyranny Of Do Gooders The late Will Rogers once said "Dear Lord, protect me from the do-gooders. Trying to "do good" is no good at all if one is not also looking for the truth". Such is the situation in the United States today with "do gooders" having influence in every level of govenment local, state and federal. Often they are driven by ideology and are open to only one side of an issue. This is because political correctness has infiltrated their mind and created a form of brain damage. This ideology almost always has a higher moral purpose in the mind of the "do gooder". Almost certainly the only way they can be cured of this brain damage is by having one of their laws or rules affect them personally. At the beginning of the 21st century, government in the United States is far more invasive than it was at the middle of the 20th century. Privacy outside the bedroom has essentially disappeared. The sphere of parental influence and authority has been greatly reduced. Every locality has government officers eager to reinterpret any parental behavier as abuse and to regulate the family function of raising children. Repressive though it might have been, the American society of yesterday was freer in many respects than it is today. Now, we're prosecuted for what we might do, not actually what we have done. By creating so many "non-laws" through the fears of the voters, we are not making a safer world; we are making a country where every human action imaginable will somehow eventually be legislated. The ease with which innocents can be railroaded is scary. For example, the innocent adults framed by a crazed detective and corrupt Child Protective Service officers in the Wenatchee Washington child sex abuse witch hunt had to be pried loose one by one from the claws of prosecutors. During McCarthyism, teachers feared for their jobs if they belonged to a left-wing group. Today teachers fear for their jobs if they discipline or hug a child. Men in the workplace must always be on guard, fearfull anything they say or do is interpreted as harassment. As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person's life. Hysteria trumps evidence. The proportion of innocent men on death row has become scandalous. A justice system that convicts innocents on the serious charges of murder or child abuse is certain to convict innocents on less serious charges, as well. In the United States today, punishment has been separated from guilt and is the likely fate of anyone, innocent or guilty, who has the misfortune to encounter the courts. The United States now has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. How did the land of the free become the worlds largest jailer? Because the justice system has lost the ability to screen out unbalanced people who use their offices not to serve justice, but to serve bureaucratic success indicators such as conviction rates, propagandistic politically correct causes and tort lawyers. If truth be known, some of the worst criminals in the country are residing in the offices of the justice system. We have reached an uncomfortable impasse. We need belief to make life meaningful, yet we cannot allow ourselves to believe in anything. Every faith, institution, political faction and ideal has proved at some level to be a tissue of hypocrisy. We decry our own cynicism, but recognize that, at some level, it is merely realism. Some of us retreat into conventional orthodoxies; others free-float, aimless in an increasingly valueless society. But there is another alternative: starting from scratch to see if we may discover for ourselves something like universal truth and build the whole thing over again.
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