By Tony Casson

We human beings are a curious lot.

We go places we shouldn’t go, look at things we shouldn’t look at, and wonder about things that have no business entering our minds.

We have a natural tendency to develop our own sense of morality and then we convince ourselves that everything we do is OK.

We pick and choose what profanities we will use, and when it is acceptable to sue them.

Somehow we have managed to program ourselves into believing that if it is shown on TV during primetime, then that exact behavior is acceptable in realtime.

Somewhere along the line making love was replaced with having sex and “looking slutty” was substituted for “being sexy”.

Morality and decency were displaced by our “freedom of expression” and our individual God-given Civi Rights, but it’s not OK to pray or have a relationship with God. And if you do, you’d damn well better keep it to yourself.

Planning futures, raising families, and teaching values has turned into making sure the DVR is set to record “Two and a Half Men” and “Family Guy”, and let’s not forget that Friday night favorite, “The Lingerie Football League”!

Insomnia and the graveyard shift used to be rewarded with old movies. Now late night is filled with Girls Gone Wild and 30 minutes of reminding that millions of men have learned how to increase the size of “that certain part of the male body”.

Blink, blink, blink.

I guess the size of the ship finally won out over the motion of the ocean.

Keep your eyes open, because next up is “ExTongueZ”. We’ll all be able to touch or foreheads with our tongues and we’ll give new meaning to the phrase tongue-in-cheek. Because when you get one of those you’ll know it, eh?

We used to respect our elders and now it seems we hardly respect ourselves.

Once we were forced to leave our homes to explore the wonders of the world and now we don’t even need to get pressed.

A president of the United States has phone sex from Air Force One with someone not even his wife, whom he has used a cigar on as if it were a dildo, and a sex therapist asks me, “Have you had any deviant thoughts?”

Ummm-hell-I don’t know!

From what I see and hear, doesn’t sound like it.

We’ve made reaching new lows of morality, and new heights of depravity the topics de jour of numerous talk and reality shows.

We’ve stopped using our heads and our hearts when it comes to falling in love, choosing instead to pay someone else to make these decisions for us. It’s faster, easier, and there’s someone else to blame when it goes wrong.

We spend billions to incarcerate wrongdoers and nothing to feed, clothe, educate and house our poor. We force countless numbers of our citizens into lives of crime simply to survive and then waste more billions to build more prisons to house them.

There is always plenty of money to throw at situations after disaster strikes, but never enough to invest in preventing the disaster in the first place.

We overlook bad behavior in our entertainment icons, civic, leaders, sports heroes, and other pillars of our communities, and then have the audacity to expect good behavior from our children.

We are afraid to draw a line of decency in the sand because we fear that we, ourselves, will be the first to cross it.

Our hopes and dreams for the future have been shortened to “It’s my money and I want it NOW”, simply because we want everything now.

There was a time when we believed “good things are worth waiting for”, but that was before we found out how good instant gratification felt.

A house is no longer a home in which to raise our families. It has become simply something to fight over in divorce proceedings, or something to turn a profit on after a few years, and that’s OK as long as it’s just me doing it, because if you do it too, prices go up even more, which makes the food we eat more expensive and the cars we drive cost more than the first house we bought, and all in the name of life, liberty, and pursuit of the American dream.

But the American dream has nothing to do with America, today. Because when people think about America today, all they think about is aMErica.

We have lost our way, ladies and gentlemen, and I assume my share of the irresponsibility  for getting us headed in the wrong direction and ending up where we are today.

Yes, we humans are a curious lot.

My own part in all fo this nearly cost me my life by my own hand. I am convinced that God intervened and saved my life, but don’t you worry; I am not going to preach to you. But whether you like it or not, I AM going to pray–pray for all of us.