Absolute Truth vs. Absolute Chaos

Thirty years ago Daddy and I went on a safari to Africa. Nobody can quite imagine just how big Africa is until he experiences it. We flew into Johannesburg and rented a VW van. I told Daddy that it looked like a two-hour drive to our destination - the town of Kuruman. I had simply looked at a map, gauged the distance by American standards, and made my estimate. After a fast-paced twelve-hour drive, we arrived in Kuruman!

I called our guide Hennie and invited him to our hotel for dinner. Hennie said “George, that would be most inconvenient!” I asked him why.

“George, you are 200 kilometers from me, and much of that is simply a dirt track.” I said “Hennie, how can it be that you are in the local phone book?” Hennie said

“George, around here 200 kilometers means ‘next door’!”

That was just the beginning of learning what “vast” means. We traveled 100 miles from the nearest house, and we didn’t know which direction that 100 miles might be. Without Hennie, Daddy and I could have gotten lost and perhaps died in the desert. We had to have someone who knew the terrain.

There is now something that could have told us our position within ten feet of where we are on earth - the Global Positioning Systems (GPS). That would have come in handy! The GPS compass uses radio signals from a series of satellites circling the earth and times the radio signals to gauge the distance from each of those satellites. That tells it exactly where it is.

A military intelligence officer friend told me that the GPS can become useless at a moment’s notice. He said that he can simply ‘scramble’ the satellite radio signal, and the GPS has no point of reference. This radio control keeps an enemy from using it in a missile against us.

America has enemies who are scrambling our own ‘GPS signal’. A while back we learned of another huge accounting scam that cost us billions of dollars while enriching the scammers with those same billions. Americans are in financial and mental shock after learning that their stock is worthless and several of their corporate heroes are crooked.

How could those people act this way? Don’t they know that false accounting is exactly the same as grand theft? Why didn’t they care about investors’ retirement plans and college tuition plans that were built on stocks? Why didn’t they care about their own employees?

None of this should come as a surprise. Whatever they did was okay by us. Of course we didn’t say it in so many words; we simply scrambled their moral Global Positioning System. As a nation, we declared that since there is no absolute truth, there is no right or wrong way to travel. Each person must find his own moral compass. A group of corporate executives simply traveled by a different route. They simply took a shortcut to wealth and power.

The price we are paying isn’t in the billions of lost dollars, but in our very souls. We have lost our way, because we have given up our point of reference.

It still grieves me to think of President Clinton in the Rose Garden surrounded by fawning Democrats who supported his licentious activities with Monica Lewinsky, and his lying to us. Democrats and the media told us that what the President did in the Oval Office was his business. Lying to us was also his business because we should not have been concerned about Lewinsky, or the rape of Juanita Broadrick, or the dozens of his other well-documented predatory sexual escapades.

Who’s to say those Democrats, or the Enron and WorldCom executives, were wrong? Don’t they have a right to their moral compass,” just as we have a right to ours.

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