If I was to ask you what country do you believe is the most peaceful in the world, would you think that the United States is number one?

Would you think that the United States ranks in the top 10?

Would you think the US ranks in the top 20, 30, 40 or 50?

How about the top 100?

If your answer was any of the rankings I just suggested above you would be wrong.

According to the index recently released by the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace the U.S. ranked the 114th most peaceful nation on earth.

Does that surprise you, it surprised me.

It gets even worse, the U.S. fell 11 places from last years index.

Iceland remained at the top as the most peaceful country in the world, a position it has held since 2008. It is also joined in the top 10 of the index by New Zealand, Portugal, Austria, and Denmark.

Now let us look at some of our allies which did rank in the top 20 of the index, those would include Canada, Japan, Australia, Ireland and Germany.

With all the problems the United Kingdom is having it is still ranked at #41.

The report states that:

The U.S. deterioration is primarily driven by the growing intensity of internal conflict within the country, which was partly seen in the divisive 2016 Presidential election, as well as increases in the perceptions of criminality across American society

The report went on to cite the impact of the:

Rising homicide rates in several major American cities

Now we have to sit back and think what the heck is going on in our country that would rank the U.S. as only the 114th most peaceful nation. This is not a ranking we should be proud of.

I did not necessarily think we would be #1 or even in the top 10 but at least in the top 20.

We have a growing anger and violence in our country an anger and violence that we need to agree that is occurring and attempt to understand where it is coming from. Is it our politics, our economy, our culture or does it stem from the attack on our culture we have been witnessing for years now?  An attack that erodes our morals and ethics

We are going down a path here in the United States were a certain ethical or moral code we use to live by is under attack.

Have you heard the term Moral Relativism?

Moral relativism is the view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint (for instance, that of a culture or a historical period) and that no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others. It has often been associated with other claims about morality: notably, the thesis that different cultures often exhibit radically different moral values.

 

It is the denial that there are universal moral values shared by every human society; and the insistence that we should refrain from passing moral judgments on beliefs and practices characteristic of cultures other than our own.

Thus there are no real basic morals so there really is no right or wrong, it depends on the culture or historical period.

Is that what you want here in the United States?

I certainly do not.

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