The First Casualty of Relativistic Society is Truth.

More specifically, the first casualty is truth to power. When the concept of good and evil is brushed aside as the product of weak and/or inferior minds, it provides fertile ground for the emerging of very power-hungry and corrupt leaders. Truth becomes subservient to power, and as George Orwell said, “History is something to be created rather than learned.” In other words, the powerful, in the absence of objective truth, create it, and the scariest part is that our leaders are so confident in their powerful positions, they all too readily, confess.

" [He] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. [...] That’s not the way the world really works anymore. continued. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” -- Karl Rove to Ron Suskind in New York Times Magazine on October 17, 2004

We've already seen some of the most brutal regimes spring forth throughout the twentieth century--the darkest century in history. In less than 30-years’ time, these totalitarian regimes brought about two devastatingly bloody world wars. Yet, as we begin the twenty-first century, moral relativism ( the notion that there is no objective moral truth, no right or wrong) reigns supreme, rendering evil's very existence as subjective.

In a culture or society that claims there is no absolute truth, our leaders can use his Noble Peace Prize win as a platform for making the case for war as President Obama did when he told his speechwriters,  "he intended to use the acceptance speech to make the case for war."  But those who would claim this is morally wrong are dismissed as rigid, fundamentalist, judgmental, and/or intolerant. In fact, tolerance is the only "moral" claim that one can make without being slapped with the aforementioned labels. Of course, President Obama is not the first, nor the last leader to twist the truth into whatever he wants it to be.

So war is peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery. This is what our leaders are telling us, and we accept it as "truth".  Therefore, war, technological advances, profit, or really anything created  at the expense of nature and mankind is just fine.

Granted, those who are easily seduced by the prospect of wealth and power, and who lack conscience naturally gravitate toward leadership positions, and that's why it's our job to hold those people accountable. But to what? If there are no absolutes.

"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. [George Orwell, 1984, Part 1, Chapter 3.]

The secret of their success? How U.S. leaders from JFK to Roosevelt and George W Bush share character traits with psychopaths

A character trait in psychopaths has been identified by scientists as a common thread in successful US presidents.

Fearless dominance, which is linked to less social and physical apprehensiveness, boosts leadership, persuasiveness, crisis management and congressional relations, according to new research.

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This is the Hypocrisy We Should Tune In.

Eliot Spitzer may be hypocritical but his hypocrisy cannot compare to the duplicitous way we impose further punishment on the young men we flaunt our patriotism for...whose lives, in so many cases, will not only never be the same, but whose dreams for the future were obliterated.

One day people will look back at the way we draped ourselves in "red, white and blue", chastising anyone who didn’t chant "We Support our Troops," just like the sheep who chanted "Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good" in George Orwell's Animal Farm, and then take a look at the way those who served this country were treated and they will see the blatant hypocrisy and willful ignorance of a nation distracted by an over abundance of everything.

According to The Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, the soldiers, we glibly "honor" with dollar store "patriotism", have to wait, at the very least six months, or should something go wrong during these unnecessary procedures and red tape, up to two years to qualify for Veterans’ benefits. This dereliction of duty occurs because as soon as the soldier is discharged from the military, he immediately loses all of his benefits, no matter how severe his injuries. It makes no difference whether the soldiers are severely wounded or not, they must be processed through the archaic paper based system, still in existence thanks to tax cuts for those who need an entire staff to track their wealth, in an effort to prove themselves worthy of receiving any compensation for the wounds sustained abroad.

The burden is placed entirely on the veteran, who has already trudged through places and experienced things most of us only see in our nightmares, to prove he deserves benefits. The presumption is that whatever the veteran is claiming is wrong with him is not therefore he must gather all the documentation, doctor’s notices, all of the hospital forms and all the things from all the different places to prove he is indeed injured and in need of care, even though prior to his discharge from the military, his condition was already confirmed.

We should presume the veteran is entitled to his benefits and it is up to the government to prove why not. Our tax system is set up in such a way that the burden is on the government to prove that what we're presenting as true, is false, by auditing a small subset of taxpayers, in hopes that that will be enough to prevent people from cheating the system.

Many of us are ignorant of the way soldiers are treated once they return home, however that is no excuse, because it is our duty as citizens to make sure those we send into battle are at the very least taken care of without delay or made to endure further trauma.

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