Foremost, doing what is right. Telling the truth. Giving a shit about the less fortunate. Being honorable. A nation of laws. Due process. Freedom.

But is it? Well, to me, not really.

And maybe it is even too much to ask or hope for that an America be a place it professes to be.

Certainly, we can look through history and see plenty of examples of this broken covenant of ideals between man and its institutions. And most likely a person well studied in the conflict perspective of American history will state America has never been about true freedom or liberty.

Still, it seems to me that never has this blatant disregard of what this country is supposed to be versus how it really is, been so glaringly obvious.

Over the past decade we have had plenty of glaring examples of this: a president clearly invades a country that had nothing to do with an attack on these shores. Torture. Murder. Rendition.

And what? So long as you pick an enemy that is beneath defense, you can kick that enemy all you want?

And ALL of us are complicit in this problem, mainly by our self-created safe bubble of self-imposed ignorance and refusal to take action and try to do anything.

Our lack of collective outrage regarding issues of our supposed national ideal system is baffling to me. It seems as if the singular can declare "I am a good and decent person" then that is satisfaction enough. That that is where the demands of a country live as it claims can end.

Our house is not in order. When a politician can stand before a group of people and brag about his executions, when one of those is known to be innocent, and a country cheers, it clearly shows there is rot in this country.

When we as a people allow a horrifying attack to become the next selling point for American products, that too is a sign of rot.

The odd thing in all of this, though, is that while it does appear mankind is sort of living by the rules of nature (survival of the fittest, the powerful eat the weak and so on), the biggest benefactors of this practice are those who disbelieve in science the most.