The public is worried about a lethal virus gaining a foothold in America. I would make the argument one already has.

There is little question Ebola is one of the deadliest killers on earth. But for the most part, it can be contained. Amorality, on the other hand, is thoroughly entrenched, and “infecting” new victims every day.

Note I said amorality, not immorality. If America were infected with widespread immorality, it would be easily recognized and likely dealt with. Amorality is far more insidious because it requires no effort whatsoever to “go with the flow” and make no concrete decisions about anything. Thus if an utterly corrupt mainstream media continually repeats some version of the idea that bloodthirsty savages who place weapons in civilian facilities and use their own people as human shields are “no better or worse” than a nation facing an existential threat from those savages, amorality requires no protest, no introspection, no nothing.

As I noted in a previous column, a Pew survey reveals the pathetic immorality of liberal Democrats, only 39 percent of whom could muster up sympathy for the Jewish State. A more recent Pew survey  confirms the further left one travels, the greater the sympathy for Hamas. A poll taken between July 24 and 27 reveals that 44 percent of the American left believes Israel has gone too far in the conflict with Hamas, compared to only 33 percent who think the response has been about right.

Yet the new survey reveals something far more disturbing. When the question was posed, “Who is the most responsible for the current violence?” a whopping 28 percent of Americans said they “didn’t know.”

That’s amorality.

Now one can certainly make the case that a large component of such amorality is ignorance, but so what? Ignorance in this day and age, where millions upon millions of bytes of information are almost instantly accessible, ought to be seen as the national scourge it truly represents. The level of obliviousness required to have no opinion about a war whose eventual outcome will have a huge impact on the entire world is breathtaking – especially when one considers that many of those same people can quote you chapter and verse on the latest escapades regarding any number of airhead celebrities.

As thoughtful Americans are beginning to realize, such amorality is a breeding ground for bigger and bigger government, courtesy of a ruling elite more than satisfied with the idea that increasing levels of amorality and the ignorance it breeds require the steady hand of our “superiors” in Washington, D.C. to “stabilize” the nation.

Those would be the same superior folks from one and one-half of our two man political parties who have countenanced an out-and-out invasion at our Southwestern border and the dispersion of those invaders as far away as Hawaii and Alaska. They are also on board with granting millions of their fellow invaders a “pathway to citizenship” as a reward for breaking our immigration laws.

How does our ruling class get away with that betrayal? Very simple. They tell you expediency is far more important than the rule of law. They conjure up images of having to deport millions of people all at once, instead of making it onerous enough for illegals living here that they deport themselves, over no particular time frame. They tell you it’s a “humanitarian” crisis, even as they don’t tell you the governments of  Mexico and Guatemala have made a deal to facilitate travel to our border, rather than prevent it. They tell you they are powerless to stop the current flow, when everyone with a scintilla of common sense knows that if Mexican soldiers, drug cartel thugs or potential terrorists from Middle East nations were crossing into America virtually at will, a real government could completely stop such an invasion in a matter of days.

Of course I’m exaggerating. Not about the invaders. As the above hyperlinks reveal, that’s already happening. I’m talking about having a real government, led by a real Commander-in-Chief who respects the law, and puts the concerns of Americans first. Instead we have one that caters to a coalition comprised of those who think our borders, customs, culture and language are just so “yesterday,” and business elitists who want cheap labor to work at their companies, and even cheaper labor to cut their grass, serve their drinks, clean their hotel rooms – and go live “somewhere else” when their shifts are over.

None of this would be remotely possible in a nation with a clear understanding of right and wrong. What we have instead is one with a small percentage of people who even think in those terms, trying to engage a vast majority of terminally disengaged Americans, for whom the path of least resistance is all that matters.

Where I part company with a lot of well-meaning people is the place where they conflate ignorance with stupidity. It’s easy to understand why so many Americans want to believe the two terms are interchangeable. It allows them to dismiss their fellow Americans as genuinely incapable of understanding the important issues of our time. While the term may be somewhat cruel, “stupid” is an accurate description of people who do in fact lack the capacity to engage in coherent thought.

Ignorance is a whole other ballgame. And I would submit the reason people don’t want to make the distinction between it and stupidity is because it would force them to confront one of the scariest realities of our time:

Ignorance is an acquired skill.

I’m old enough to remember a time when the oh-so-clever doyens of public education decided that thinking, logic and intellectual pursuit should take a back seat to feelings and the preservation of self-esteem at all costs. What little students actually learned in terms of facts and figures became secondary to how they felt about themselves. In short, the entire system was turned on its head by those firmly convinced that kids had to feel good about themselves before learning to achieve, instead of learning to achieve so they could feel good about themselves. This cataclysmic misunderstanding of human nature has turned the finest educational system in the world into an international laughingstock. It has produced legions of weak-thinking Americans who nonetheless remain supremely confident – even arrogant – with regard to their intellectual “prowess.” Furthermore, this massive dumbing-down of the electorate shows no signs of slowing down.

The so-called handwriting has been on the proverbial wall for a long time. And it is truly telling that these days that handwriting better be in print, because the same educational establishment that has opted to drop cursive writing from curriculums, is apparently unconcerned by the reality that kids who can’t write cursive can't read it. Those would be the same kids who also can’t do even the simplest math equations without a calculator.

The original version of our Constitution is written in cursive, and math is the gateway to logic, aka the foundation of Western culture. What could possibly go wrong?

I used to think such educational malpractice was borne of incompetence. Yet when I see millions of Americans cruising along in neutral, willing to let someone else do their thinking for them, I can no longer believe that is the case. I believe we are living in a time where ignorance is cultivated because such ignorance, and the amorality that accompanies it, accrues to the interests of our ruling elite. A ruling elite that has convinced large swaths of the American public that defending one’s nation – whether it be from missile-shooting, tunnel-burrowing murderers, or government- and drug cartel-abetted invaders – is a futile endeavor at best, or an utterly immoral one at worst.

Like I said, Ebola can be contained. Our cultural decline? The “patient” is in serious need of intensive care, lest the condition become irreversible. We are dangerously close to that point.

© 2014 The Patriot Post.