The loss of dignity in America.

My father told me once: You alone define who you are, not your job, not your education, not your family.

I pair this often with a thought placed in the mouth of Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in the novel "The Killer Angels." In the novel, Colonel Chamberlain remarks that part of the central idea of America is that each one of us has value. Nobody has to bow to anyone else, nobody is born to royalty, in a sense, we are all on somewhat equal footing.

Is that really the case today? I think not, unfortunately. I can cite many examples.

Let's take the example of a young African American born to a poor family in inner-city Chicago. Sure we like to point to our current president and say he escaped this exact scenario. He is the exception rather than the unfortunate rule. Statistics will show that these children will be far more likely to be swallowed up in the rising tide of poor educational opportunities and gang violence. Certainly, there are choices to be made for these individuals. You can choose to make the best of your inner city education, but what kind of education do you get from an overcrowded high school and a bunch of teachers who are only there because the state will forgive their student loans if they put in their time at the failing schools. Even in the state of Utah, newly minted teachers, white and delightsome and freshly out of college swamp the rural and suburban school districts looking for jobs, while more than one person I know has said they would never work in the inner-city districts of Ogden and Salt Lake City. I'll tell you folks, inner city Ogden, though a little scary, is nothing like inner city LA, St. Louis, or Memphis.

We used to have Affirmative Action to try and get kids from these schools into college. There's some evidence that it worked, yet this has become something of yesteryear. We would much rather turn our heads and say these people don't exist.

What about the white guy with a Master's Degree that can't find a job anywhere but Wal Mart. He didn't bank on not being able to find a job when he graduated. Maybe his wife is pregnant. What does he do? He's done everything right, made all the right choices according to our societal model, and he's stuck. He has a master's degree, something less than one percent of the world population has, and he's stuck being a cashier at a retail joint. People yell at him because their loaf of bread didn't ring up at the price they thought it would.

If you are either of the people listed above, where do you draw your dignity from? Do you have any? More and more in our country, the richest country ever to grace the earth, people lose their dignity. It's hard when you're working a job that you're overqualified for just to get by. It's hard when you're trying to make the most of a horrible environment around you. Some manage to find that dignity and self-worth, some don't.

Some of us go to work everyday at a job we hate just to get by, while others of us sit at desk, paid by the government to do little more than read novels. Some of us won't go to the doctor unless death is knocking at the door because we have no health insurance. Others of us will go to the doctor every time we get a little sniffle just so he can prescribe some drug that we think will make us feel better. The overuse of medication in America has given rise to threat of super bacteria that is immune to antibiotics through evolutionary principles.

Perhaps the biggest indignity in recent years took place in New Orleans in 2005. Literally hundreds of thousands of people could not flee the path of Hurricane Katrina because they had no transportation. That's right, hundreds of thousands of citizens in the greatest country in the world were trapped in the middle of a predicted and forseen natural disaster simply because they had no car. We all watched the aftermath on television as FEMA and the Bush administration bungled the relief effort day after day while the President cowered first at his ranch in Texas and then later behind the backs of bureaucrats he would use as scapegoats. This led to hundreds of uncovered, dead, bloated and rotting corpses being beamed into the houses of millions of Americans at the dinner table, yet still we moan and grumble when the government wants to spend money on disaster preparedness and health care.

We won't let the government be the equalizer, because maybe we really don't want to be equal.

I don't believe that about most Americans though. While Bush bungled the Katrina response, many Americans gave of their money and time to help in charitable relief efforts, and that's great. That's what we should be doing.

However, millions of Americans walk around in our towns and cities everyday without their dignity. This holiday season, please help to restore some dignity to your fellow Americans. Give a little bit bigger tip at the restaurant, smile at the cashier when you go shopping. Tip your hat to the stranger on the street. Donate a few dollars to your favorite charity or drop some coins in the Salvation Army bucket. If we all work hard, we can go a long way to bringing out that inherent value and dignity in each of us.