Guns, Dollars, and God

"These days I see graft and corruption reach high into government. These days I see people afraid to speak their minds because someone will think they are unorthodox and therefore disloyal. These days I see America identified more and more with material things, less and less with spiritual standards. These days I see America drifting from the Christian faith, acting abroad as an arrogant, selfish, greedy nation, interested only in guns and dollars, not in people and their hopes and aspirations. These days the words of my father come back to me more and more."

That's William O. Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1939 to 1975. in an essay from 1951 for NPR's "This I Believe" feature. Every few weeks, I try and listen to a few of these essays at work, and each times I've been amazed.

Some other thougths from recent This I Believe pieces:

"I believe in the politics that wrote the GI Bill, that passed the Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-devastated Europe, that saved the Great Lakes and that through Social Security took want and terror out of old age. The kind of politics that teaches us all we owe to those who came before us and those who will come after. That each of us has drunk from wells we did not dig; that each of us has been warmed by fires we did not build."
Political Analyst Mark Shields


" I believe that families are not only blood relatives, but sometimes just people that show up and love you when no one else will."
Cecile Gilmer, an events planner from Utah, who was taken in by a friend's family as a teenager