To leave a country and go to another country ....

Is it because we are called the Land of Opportunity ...or is it for safe refuge??

People often came to have an opportunity they felt they did not have in their own country.  Many of them had a small farm or business ...and lived in a small home, or above their business.  And they worked long hours ...spending little money on leisure, but spending much time maintaining the family and nurturing the friendship they had.  It was a neighborly attitude which looked out for the well-being of everyone around them.

Those who did not look out for the needs of others, but rather stole and destroyed property ...were not looked at in a favorable light.  Horse thieves were hanged, and no less punishment came to those who destroyed property.  Why is that??

It is because those who destroyed the livelihood of individuals, were taking the opportunity away for those to live an already very difficult life.

You could argue that drafting people to fight a war would be doing this in a more direct way ...but our U.S. draft ended in 1973, and those honorable men and women who volunteer should be considered brave and courageous.  Yet, those who returned home from the Vietnam war after having been drafted ...were doing what they had little choice to do, and it is unthinkable to hear that many were spit on.

On a small scale, yet significant enough patterns to see a very bad rational ...is the reasoning of an organization that surprisingly has gained teaching positions in colleges and universities within our nation. I will use one example here, though there are many. Organizational heads and active participants in the Weather Underground admitted to stealing and the destruction of property.

They also felt they should do more ...as they themselves admitted to the fact that they were not doing enough.

What does doing more entail??

How long can a person convince themselves that destroying property will never lead to anything more than just that ...when admittedly they said they felt they needed to do more??    

And how can a person justify destroying property of a group of people ...as a reaction to displeasure of how others have handled themselves, and the decisions surrounding their present times??

How does a person seek to punish a group for what independent individuals do??

To answer that question, it seems that two other questions must be asked:

• Does the individual support the actions of the group ...and if not, why would the person continue on in the group??
• Does the group support the actions of all individuals in the group ...and if not, why would they allow those individuals to remain in the group?? 

Or perhaps we should ask whether the group is more important than the individuals ...and if the needs of the individual is claimed to be a high priority, is that actually true.  Or is it merely to establish a deception to warrant support for the group's ulterior motives??

At a 1965 Ann Arbor Teach-In ...Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) President Paul Potter, asked his audience, "How will you live your life so that it doesn't make a mockery of your values?" Ayers later wrote in his memoir, Fugitive Days, that his reaction was: "You could not be a moral person with the means to act, and stand still. [...] To stand still was to choose indifference. Indifference was the opposite of moral."

It seems selective indifference grows to a unrestrained level when thinking that the 'end justifies the means' ...and that a rationale to justify actions is similar to an immature child who claims "He did it first!"