Reversing America’s Moral Decline Won’t Be Easy, But It’s 100% Necessary

It’s enough to make your hair stand up on end… or maybe your stomach to churn until you puke.

In either case, this is what happens when we as a society cheapen the value of life through abortion-on-demand, blood-soaked video games, and gratuitous violence passing as entertainment on TV and in the movies.

Over the past week, the news has been filled with one story after another of crimes so heinous that they seem ripped from the pages of a Stephen King novel. Most of them have been lost in the coverage of the Tesla demonstrations, the ongoing tariff wars, and ceasefire negotiations in Ukraine and Gaza but trust me, they are still there – right under the surface – and they are as disturbing as the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Only instead of watching a deranged Anthony Perkins stab an unsuspecting Janet Leigh to death, we are forced to read a true-life account about a woman traveling from Orlando to Bogota, Columbia who drowned her dog in an airport toilet.

Her reasoning? She lacked the necessary paperwork to take her 9-year-old miniature schnauzer on board the plane and so, she reverted to Plan B. How anyone with a functioning conscience could devise and implement such a devilish plan is beyond me, but at least the woman was tracked down (thanks to the dog’s locator chip) and charged with a third-degree felony. Released on a $5,000 bond, she could face up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine if a bill sponsored by FL Republican state Sen. Tom Leek becomes law this legislative session.

Personally, I would like to see her slammed with a 10-year prison sentence spent on her hands and knees scrubbing the same kind of toilet bowls she drowned Tywinn the schnauzer in.

And yet, it gets worse… as if that were possible.

The next two crimes don’t involve a 57-year-old woman, but rather two sets of minority teens. In the first instance, two 19-year-old Florida high school students are accused of brutally beating a teacher in what police called a "synchronized physical attack" that was captured on video.

The Fort Lauderdale Police Department told ABC News that Jayvis L. McClover and Roddrick McQueen approached the teacher at Dillard High School around 2:00 PM on March 13th and “verbally threatened to attack him."

Police said McClover and McQueen – who are both enrolled at the school – then "intentionally launched a synchronized physical attack" on the teacher and "repeatedly punched the teacher in the face and head with closed fists," after which the teacher fell to the ground, the news network reported.

Police said the students continued to punch the teacher while he was on the ground "in a fetal position attempting to guard himself against injury.” School security staff pulled the two students away from the teacher, who suffered "swelling and bruising and reported pain in his back as a result of the attack.”

McClover and McQueen both were charged with battery on a public or private education employee, police told ABC News. The Broward County Sheriff's Office said that McClover was released from jail the following day on a $15,000 bond while McQueen was released on March 16th with no bond but placed on house arrest with electronic monitoring. Both McClover and McQueen were ordered not to return to the high school (no kidding!)

The extremely disturbing video also features on-camera interviews with five individuals – apparently students at the school – who either smiled or laughed when describing the altercation. Some of them accused the teacher of "provoking" the two arrested students.

Daniel Foganholi Sr., a board member with the Florida Department of Education, said that the incident was a "failure of respect, discipline and accountability.”

"No educator should fear for their safety while doing their job," Foganholi said. “Schools must be places of learning, not battlegrounds." Foganholi also emphasized the need for "stronger disciplinary policies, better security measures and a culture that respects and protects our teachers.”

"If we fail to act, we fail our educators, our students, and our future," Foganholi said. "Enough is enough."

Sadly, it wasn’t enough, because a video posted to Instagram recently led to the arrest of three New Mexico youths – ages 11, 13, and 15 – who stole a car and then used it to run over and kill a cyclist. Incredibly, the video was filmed and proudly posted on social media by the assailants themselves.

The video records the 15-year-old passenger telling the 13-year-old driver "just bump him, brah." The video then shows the vehicle accelerating before it hits Scott Dwight Habermehl, 63, a Ph.D. physicist from Corrales, a community 16 miles north of Albuquerque. Habermehl was bicycling to his job as a military contractor at Sandia National Laboratories.

"Scott was riding his bike with his helmet in a bike lane with a safety light on when he was struck by a car, and the car left," Police Cmdr. Kyle Hartsock said.

Similar to the high school students who laughed about the brutal attack on the teacher, Habermehl’s three murderers demonstrated no remorse for their crime.

"The front passenger, believed to be the 11-year-old who was waving a handgun, ducked and laughed as the front passenger side of the vehicle struck Habermehl," police said in a statement. "There were loud sounds, including metal flexing, as the momentum of the crash carried Habermehl and his bicycle on top, and off, the passenger side of the vehicle."

Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller called the three assailants “runaways, dropouts, and murderers.”

The two older boys, both of whom had prior criminal records, have been charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, leaving the scene of a collision involving injury or death and unlawful possession of a firearm. Unbelievably, the 11-year-old has been deemed too young to prosecute and was turned over to the state Children, Youth & Families Department for evaluation.

My friends, these kind of news stories – once rarer than Haley’s Comet or a Big Foot sighting – are becoming all too commonplace. Somehow, we, as a society, have to find a way to put the genie back in the bottle and reintroduce morality and common decency into our culture, starting with our young people.

For far too long we have exposed them to the dark, sordid, and unseemly underbelly of America. Now it’s time to start showing them what it good, right, and wholesome about this “City on a Hill”, as both John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan called our country. Reagan and Abraham Lincoln also referred to the United States as man’s “last, best hope on earth”… and they were right, but only if we get our act together and our spiritual house in order.

Folks, it’s time to stop pussyfooting around. Right is right, wrong is wrong, and there is such a thing as absolute truth. It is found in the Bible and the Judeo-Christian principles upon which this great nation was founded.

John Adams understood that when he said, “"This constitution was written for a moral and religious people. It is wholly unfit for any other."

Let’s turn back to God while there is still time. Our forefathers – and future generations of Americans – deserve no less.