David Fowler President

June 30, 2009

America has spurned the notion of any truth that would establish a boundary for social interaction within which people can exercise liberty without it degenerating into lawlessness and licentiousness. Where will our “new” understanding of unbounded liberty end?

Russian Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in a 1978 speech to the graduating class of Harvard University, made an observation we would do well to ponder as we consider our future course:

Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. … All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty… .

In the 1960’s President Johnson led America into a “war on poverty.” Perhaps it’s time Americans consider a different kind of “war” on a different kind of “poverty.”