A shades of grey society…

Have we become a “shades of grey” society, not longer able to discern moral black and white?

I live in Milford, a small Midwestern village in southeastern Michigan. I live on a corner across the street from a grade school. My corner has a four way stop. It has signs in all four corners and a big lighted overhead sign that says S-T-O-P on all four sides and above that is a flashing red light for each direction. Yet everyday, all day long, people ignore those signs and the flashing light and roll though this intersection, sometimes slowing quite a bit, sometimes not. Just a block further west on my street is a four way stop that only has the signs, and people quite often ignore them altogether and don’t even slow down.

Is this a sign of a society that no longer recognized black and white – stop and go – obey the laws? I think so. While the example of the stop sign may initially seem trivial, it begs the question of people making value judgments about how much to obey the law and maybe which laws to obey – making decisions of shades of grey. Perhaps they have fallen in that pattern because they know that there is no enforcement of those laws – in my 10 years of living here, I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve seen the local police out enforcing these stop signs and ticketing people; for ignoring them. How sad it would be to think that only through strict enforcement could we get peo-ple to obey the laws of the land - to do the right things.

But, how is this any different than people committing mortgage fraud or defrauding the government out of the first-time tax credit or falsely claiming a hardship for short sales purposes? Some of those people might claim the same type shades of grey defense as the scofflaw who run the stop sign – “I didn’t see anyone else around so it seemed OK to go on through.” Perhaps they say that they felt it was OK to cheat the bank, since the bank had screwed the original owners somehow. They were, after all, just getting even for the little guys of the world. Of maybe they’d say, “I was just trying to get back some of the money that the government took away from me in the first place.”

Whatever convoluted logic people try to use when defending their “shades of grey” moral decisions just doesn’t hold up under any kind of scrutiny. The fact is if the sign says STOP then you must actually stop. If the tax refund rules say you can’t have owned a house within X-number of years, then you can’t play the game of saying that you wife owned and not you. You can’t claim a hardship for short sales purposes while sitting in your vacation home, martini in hand, with your Bimmer out front and your loaded 401K and IRA still in the bank. Yet it happens every day.

In Michigan they actually have finally arrested people who put in (and were paid) claims for first time homebuyer tax refunds and they have never bought anything! Whay did they do it? Because they thought no one was policing the program. Sadly, for the most part, they were probably right. What we aren’t seeing is homeowners who strip foreclosed houses going to jail. Isn’t that against the law, or is it a shade of grey OK? We aren’t seeing a lot of sleazy operators who prey on the unsophisticated with credit workout schemes doing the perp-walk on nightly TV. Is their sleazy bilking of the unsuspecting somehow OK – a shade of grey? And we’re not seeing the Wall Street clowns who lost all of our money on stupid derivative bets saying anything other than “oops, my bad” in front of Congressional hearings. Does being rich make it OK to have cheated millions of people out of their life savings? Was Enron just another shade of grey?

It is, after all, a society's collective moral values that keep it from descending into chaos. One has only to look at what often happens in the aftermath of great calamity (and which still may happen in Haiti), when morals often break down under the pressure of great suffering and despair, to see what the ultimate outcome is of a slide down the slope of graying moral standards. Maybe we need to start regaining a sense of right and wrong right outside my house by enforcing the law that resulted in the stop sign being there. If we can redefine a moral black and white at that corner, maybe we can work our way up from there.

What do you think? Do we need to be concerned about the shades of grey that currently define American morals?