SOCIAL DECAY AND THE FALL OF ROME

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"You can judge the level of any civilisation by how they treat their prisoners."

Dostoevsky

Does it serve the cause for public safety to torture an 80 year old prisoner in a dark torture chamber hidden away in the bowels of a prison? Does society realize the sense of hopelessness injected into the prison population? Do they fully comprehend that this hopelessness destines your community to years of future, more violent crime?

Long before social science had developed solid methods to rehabilitate the errant, the department of correction was a failed entity offering what were then undesirable jobs. The system employed lost souls unable to secure employment in any meaningful field of work. No one really cared as they were just "turnkeys" who locked men into their cages and slid some "bread & water" under the gate. The problem is that all these years later the "dregs of society", as Mark Twain called them, are the top administrators in the DOC. They ignore any/all empirically proven rehabilitative techniques in an effort to achieve two tragic goals: [1] To hide their full ineptitude, and [2] To ensure future jobs for themselves and their morally vapid offspring. The banner of nepotism flies high in this honor bankrupt ship of fools.

There are signs of the decline our Bay Colony is fast plummeting into. Our children are devoid of respect; respect for life, respect for the less fortunate, respect for the gifts they have been given. When you teach children that some aspect of society is disposable, they take away a much more damaging mind set. The undeveloped brain of a child cannot fathom the "hows and whys", it can only cognate that it is acceptable to hate, acceptable to kill, acceptable to beat and starve an old man in the bowels of a prison. Our current system has taken the "God" out of "God and Country", and our children now serve a selfish entity which destroys innocence at an ever increasingly earlier age. How you allow your prison employees to treat the prisoners of this state has a direct impact on the welfare of your loved ones. They did not see this in Rome as they fed Christians to lions. They did not see this in Pompeii when the most important aspect of human existence became the bacchanal. We here in the commonwealth are headed for those same fates. Our social decay will result in the fall of this microcosm Rome.

It requires a true desire to see beyond surface cause and effect realities. Social science, like any other science, demands a much more stringent investigation. To halt the decay and certain demise of our society we must reconstruct the moral core of our consciousness. We must seek to reach into the bowels of the gulag, the dark prison, and rescue our souls by caring for the dying old man. We must be kind to the errant offender who the surface hatred, which has become deeply entrenched in our thought process, tells us is less than worthy as that flawed concept is fast eroding the social fabric. We must begin to teach our youth that compassion heals mankind. We cannot allow our modern day Neros to fiddle while our Rome burns.

What are you willing to do to quench the flames of moral destruction that are scorching our wounded society? Do you have the intestinal fortitude to hold the hand of a dying prisoner? Can you build a movement which teaches a principle of love for the downtrodden? Believe that you have the power to effect change. Believe that you have the ability to change the world. It starts with you today! Raise the new banner: the banner of Hope!

by Timothy J. Muise