In other words, what completes depravity such that it is resolved as with a yin yang symbol?

I am a citizen of a country that is expressing depravity in biblical proportions as well as living the results of it. For example, America eats the most meat of any nation on the planet, yet:

• a mostly meat diet creates higher levels of aggression as opposed to a diet of less meat or a vegetarian diet

• the vast majority of the meat consumed in America is toxic with the pain and suffering of the animals caged and depressed for their entire lives in addition to the toxic level of growth hormones, antibiotics, and genetically modified foods they are given.

Depravity includes the contrived, supported, and well oiled machine of ignorance that keeps the majority of the American population uninformed, apathetic, and doped. Rome is a close comparison in its most debauched cycle. Like Rome, bread and circus keeps the American population engaged with that which is profane, violent, and aggressive as well. And we told to eat yet the majority of food in any grocery store does not support or enhance health. Once again, the food ingested is toxic to body, mind, and spirit and the diet of entertainment is worse. A polluted mind takes lives to correct, whereas a polluted body is left aside at the end of this life. Certainly vestiges of that pollution carry over into the subsequent lifetimes but the person starts with a new body.

Depravity is the monster that puts war and the profits of war before the well-being of a nation’s children and then rationalizes that supreme lack of ethics. Depravity is the abuse done to a child, in many cases, from the moment it is conceived let alone from the moment born especially if born in a hospital. Barbaric suctioning processes of the nose and mouth of minutes-born babies is beyond the call of healthy. BTW, both my children were born in hospital and I am not against hospital births. But there are many ways to accomplish any task and a fragile, completely vulnerable infant needs gentility and compassion. Yet this is only one of too many examples of the abuse of our children that happen every moment of every day in America.

If we look at it then, depravity is rampant. The society as a whole is debauched (drunk, drugged, and addicted). America is violent in thoughts, actions, and policies:

• to its citizenry through the privatized and greed driven thus amoral capitalist machine that, since the industrial age, has chosen private profit over public safety and collective well-being

• to its cultural ethos. America has always behaved like an adolescent: brilliant, creative, and genuine but in general unruly, defiant, and striking out. Yet there was a time when as a population we had a decent goodness-compass and steered by it. There is a curious marker in America’s moral time line; it is the victory of the principle of equality with the Civil War. Though it would take a century for that victory to gain solid ground, it was a moment when the great truth of oneness was exclaimed. But upon the heals of that war the Industrial Revolution was born, using as it did the infrastructure of machinery created to support the war. (WWII did same.) And it’s as if the forces of darkness recognized the perfect opportunity and seized the day. They had lost the battle of a nation maintained and dependent upon an ethos of racial superiority and separatism and so they created a new ethos that accomplished a similar and maybe just as heinous goal. (similarly post WWII and the military industrial complex) And with the birth of Industry as a savior, capitalism began to devour the morality of America. We live and have what we do in every way as a result as well as the bureaucratic systems necessary to navigate it all.

• to the world. America does not export democracy. It exports trash, sickness, death, greed, and war. Let’s be honest. America takes but tries to make it look like we are giving.

So, what is the yang to the yin of depravity? What is the resolution of ignorance, cruelty, and the entrenched suffering that they perpetuate? Maybe simple virtue, across the board. Someone almost 2500 years ago gave a good list to live by. The list is called “the Eightfold Path.”