Very little about John Edwards extra-marital affair interests me. Politicians doing tawdry things is nothing new. But one statement has stuck with me for the past two days: Edwards told ABC News that his affair with Hunter began “when his wife’s cancer was in remission.”
I don’t think anything else John Edwards said comes remotely close to the idea that remission is a “qualifier” that lessens the amplitude of his transgressions. That he probably has no idea how sickening such an excuse sounds to a lot of people is a testament to the idea that, every time you think self-absorption has reached its limits, someone is willing to expand its universe.
Unfortunately, John Edwards is not alone in his self-absorption. Courtesy of the most self-absorbed generation who ever lived, my Baby Boomers, more and more Americans believe their lives revolve around one over-riding “Commandment:” what’s in it for me?
And nothing embraces the notions of self-absorption better than secularism. If religion is the “opiate of the masses,” secularism is the “heroin of hedonism.” If there is no accounting for one’s life to a power higher than oneself, there are no restraints on human depravity. We can simply make it up as we go along, secure in the notion that “everyone else does it” is the only measuring stick that matters.
John Edwards believes that. He told ABC News he believes his public career “has not ended.” “I don’t know what’s possible and what’s gone,” he said.
In modern-day America, shame is also “in remission.” The cancer of self-absorption has weakened much of our inherent decency to the point where assessing the shortcomings of John Edwards is seen as “too judgmental” by many Americans. Perhaps it is. But a nation which has chosen to substitute “legal” for “moral” should expect more people with “character” like John Edwards to pop up in the corridors of business and politics.
As one of those “passe’ cliches’” reminds us, “you reap what you sow.”
atahlert@comcast.net
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