A few years ago, a man set out to demonstrate that America was still a good place, populated by decent, kind-hearted folk.

Wait, it gets even funnier.

In his early 50s, romantic Gordon Whitmer planned to go on an American odyssey, passing through every state in the continental U.S., and he was going on foot, this bright-eyed, snow-capped dreamer.

His journey was well-publicized in his home state, and there were even some well-wishers who showed up at his point of departure to give him a nice send-off.

With only $300 in his pocket, no credit cards, no car, nothing but faith in the benevolent nature of the average American citizen, he set forth … walk, walk, walk, smack, bam, OUCH!

At the city limits, Gordon encountered a few all-American boys — let’s call them Opie, Wally, Butthead and Beavis.

They summarily “whooped the tar out of him,” took his $300 and chucked him off of a bridge.

The boys had heard on the radio that this middle-aged greenhorn was going to be walking alone with a small bundle of cash, going on some idealistic crusade.

Talk about your easy pickings! No more long lines at the ATM machine, waiting for the appropriate victim to show up!

The next thing folks heard about Gordon was that the intrepid, if naive, would-be adventurer was lying in a hospital bed, asserting that his faith in people had not been shaken.

Once he recovered from his injuries, he would still make the trip, although perhaps by bus.

When I first read the story of Gordon Whitmer in the newspaper, the cynic in me was delighted with the irony of it: Man sets out to prove that human beings are good; human beings subsequently smack him silly for entertaining such a hare-brained notion.

Really, what was he thinking?

Years later, I have a slightly different take on the event. Despite the actions of the young men above, the idea that human beings are decent should not be laughable.

Contrary to the claims of many clergymen, human beings are not wicked by nature.

The problem is that the concept of a “flawed humanity” is just so damned marketable.

It fills the tills at the mall as well as the church coffers, as we try and fill the voids of our “iniquitous” souls with stuff, stuff, and more stuff, and appease our consciences along the way.

When consumerism succeeds as wildly as it has here, and materialism, status and fashion become more important than human beings, it becomes necessary to look further than the isolated instances of violence that take place.

These are mere symptoms.

I’ll concede that human beings are inclined to take the easiest path available, which often leads to trouble.

An example: Why study every day, when I can cram the night before the exam?

As many of us know from experience, such study techniques leave a great deal to be desired. But are we “evil” because we slack off?

I would suggest that we are merely short-sighted.

When the easy path is taken in areas other than homework, the results are more serious.

Confronting these results, such as homelessness, murder, sexual assault, demagoguery, etc., it becomes easier to suspect that human beings are worthless.

This is another “easy” mistake to make. Granted, the decisions we’ve made have led us to an America with many deplorable problems. We’ve addressed these with even worse “easy” solutions.

In Los Angeles, in the name of fighting gangs and drugs, the police have been authorized to disperse groups of four or more people gathered on the street.

Whatever happened to the right to peaceably assemble?

These days, everything from loitering to participating in “immoral” sex has been criminalized.

Sodomy laws, covering fellatio and anal sex, have not been enforced in this century until recently.

Different states enforce these ante-bellum laws selectively: when they pertain to homosexual acts of sodomy.

Message: Straight folks can have as much oral and anal sex as they want, bless their souls, but let’s have no more faggotry.

An easy, if mean-spirited and wrongheaded, solution. Meanwhile, our taxes are being appropriated without our consent and used for things we revile.

Our prison populations are doubling and tripling as we try to hide the evidence of a morally-devoid culture.

So some poor schmoe sets out to prove that the human capacity for decency is still intact and gets his butt kicked for his efforts. What does this prove?

Despite the cynic’s response, it is not evidence that human beings are miserable worms any more than the number of societal ills that plague us.

Not nature alone, but nurture also, played some role in the actions of Opie, Wally, Butthead and Beavis. Isn’t it time we stopped blaming nature and started looking at the values espoused by our culture?

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James O’Donnell is a graduate student in painting, drawing and printmaking from Mesa, Ariz.