Van Zandt: Our national conscience

Clint Van Zandt • Profile • E-mail

It seems to me that for the past three or four decades America’s moral compass has misplaced its sense of direction, with the magnetic north of our national conscience gone awry. When I returned from Vietnam in 1967, I was assigned to a Military Intelligence (MI) unit in Chicago. Occasionally I substituted for the MI Agent tasked with interviewing every local conscientious objector who refused to enter military service. As I listened to the reasons given by the young men who refused to go to war, I found myself understanding their reasoning. Don’t get me wrong. I believed then as I do now in my responsibility to my country. But there needs to be a reason to go to war, a reason to die, some ultimate purpose in death. Like everyone who served in time of war, I was a different person when I came home. I saw death come far too easily. Fellow Americans just like me and Vietnamese men, women and children, were dying in a war whose goals would never be achieved, but we were dying by the thousands anyway. Eventually our purpose in Vietnam (to stop the communist domino effect in Indo-China or something like that) became first mired and then lost in some unnamed remote rice paddy, as well as in the streets of Washington, D.C. When we finally counted our losses, 58,000 Americans and by some calculations up to 800,000 Vietnamese had died. And there were thousands of other causalities of this 13-year conflict from hell.

Enter the 21^st century and Iraq, Afghanistan and other far away places where we seem to be similarly mired down, this time in urban sand traps instead of triple canopy jungles. But we’re dying just the same. In Iraq we’re spending billions in a war that we don’t seem to be winning.

As I look for a sense of reason in this country I see instead criminal looting in New Orleans by surviving citizens, opportunistic criminals, and even a few cops. This is a city that demands it be rebuilt exactly where it now sits, that is, about 10 feet below sea level, using our tax

Today some may believe that the United States, like the former Soviet Union, will collapse into itself if our flawed and damaged moral compass is not replaced by a national vision and direction that rises above politics, race and religion. — Clint Van Zandt Former FBI Profiler

dollars. And our government is seriously talking about doing just that. Future hurricanes will hit the Gulf States. We need to think, how and where should New Orleans be rebuilt, for the ultimate safety and prosperity of its citizens?  And the city deserves public servants who consider their citizenry’s welfare above their own personal gain.

This week current NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station were a [multi-billion dollar] mistake. To go even further, I don’t believe we need to spend yet billions more to return to moon (sorry NASA). At this time in our nation’s economic history, the byproducts of space travel (like Tang) are not worth the expense to me. How about developing alternate fuel automobiles instead? 

I want my precious tax dollars spent educating our people so that we can all learn to take care of ourselves. I want every citizen to be able to obtain proper housing and good medical care, and a means that will allow all of us to earn an honest, reasonable living with the chance to raise a family and eventually retire with dignity. The average salary in America is $18 an hour, hardly a comfortable living wage after taxes; this while someone like Dennis Kozlowski bilks Tyco, his employees, and his investors out of $600 million dollars. Like other corporate executives, caught and uncaught, to date, Kozlowski remains unrepentant and somehow believes himself fully justified in his actions.

Everyday I see people who hate because someone is either a Democrat or a Republican, a liberal or a conservative, a Christian or a Jew, or because of skin color or where or if you attend a house of worship. Leaders like the Revs. Jackson and Sharpton were quick to blame the slow response to the flooding of New Orleans on racism in the federal government. But in doing this they label all of us racists. What would be more helpful is to look at the actions of New Orleans Mayor Nagin (come on back, the water’s fine) and Louisiana Governor Blanco (I’ll take evacuation of the city under study), both of whom were ultimately responsible for the abysmal first response in that area. Their failure to plan and execute resulted in the needless suffering of tens of thousands of Americans in a third world-like drama that the whole world watched.

And then this week a bright guy like former U.S. Education Secretary Bill Bennett steps up and makes the unbelievable statement that “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,” and wonders why people do not understand that he really didn’t mean it. Of course President Bush didn’t get it either when he did an initial fly-over of New Orleans and the surrounding area. If Air Force One could not land in the area, our President should have strapped on a parachute like his dad and jumped into the city.

Tragically on October 1, 2005, we saw a 21-year-old OK college student with “emotional difficulties” blow himself up a mere 100 yards away from the Oklahoma - Kansas State football game. The explosion was hardly heard as 84,000 die hard fans continued to cheer for the gladiators on the field. In this same week a Wisconsin teenager, bow hunting in an open field, was shot by a man who said he mistook the teen for a squirrel. While the review of a video camera dropped by the victim revealed that the shooter promised the dying victim that he would go for help, the man instead allowed the wounded boy to bleed to death while he attended a birthday party, played video games, and went off to work without ever calling for assistance.

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