In 1962 I was 15 years old and responded to an ad in a magazine by purchasing for $15 a surplus Russian rifle from WW II. This was about the same price, method of sale and time that Lee Oswald purchased the Mannlicher he shot Kennedy with. No background checks on me or the Marine. At about the same time some guys at our high school would come on campus with gun racks in their pickups with weapons. I never heard of them getting stolen and the owners did not come in to shoot up the classes with their bolt actions. Question: what has changed?
The illegitimacy rate has skyrocketed. The divorce rate has skyrocketed. The number of kids growing up with a parent who stayed home during the day plummeted. Regular church attendance plummeted. The number of kids with checked out parents had skyrocketed. It has become a lot harder to involuntarily commit crazy and potentially violent people.
Near-instant global communications that allow for quick "fame" following a deed I think that may be another part of it
Facebook and lack of father figures in the home and community. So what is the response from the left? More authoritarianism.
Everything MrD said which results in No accountability. If you read the translation of the killer's mother on CNN In the interview she said her son had his reasons and to not judge him.WTF What reasons could anyone have to do that.
I remember kids bringing their new hunting rifles to school to show them off at lunch time. Teachers as well as students would go out to the kid's trucks to see them at lunch time. In addition: 1960 - non-marital birth rate was around 5%, in 2010 over 40%. 1962 - Prayer in schools outlawed 1967 - First scripted curse word on TV (hell) 1969 - Peak of the Vietnam War with widespread protests in the US leading to dramatic changes in popular culture 1969 - Start of "no-fault" divorces across the US 1970s - Corporal punishment is phased out of schools 1973 - Original first-person shooting game became available 1973 - Abortion legalized 1979 - Rap music became popular 1988 - First sex scene on TV 1988 - First year with double digit school shootings 1993 - Doom, the first multiplayer first person shooting game was released and became the most influential first-person shooting game ever 2009 - Last year of single digit school shootings in a year I'm sure there are plenty of more influences.
I don't think there's any magic to it. We got soft on irresponsibility. There used to be a real price to pay for it. It's far less now.
Mr D For most there is no price to pay. For most people blame the gov't and lack of "program" to pay for it.
Kinda related anecdote. In early 90s a friend of a friend who had a pretty good midlevel management job with good retirement benefits that she did not take advantage of complained she would not have enough to retire on And lamented the Goverment should have told her to save more. She may have been the inspiration for cradle to grave Julia ( was that the name Dems used in those ads.
The left is fond of saying "if you see it, you can be it" when they promote their ESG/DEI initiatives. I think there is something to that but it cuts both ways. While it is helpful for a young girl to see a woman as CEO and thereby believe it is possible, it is equally harmful for a young girl to see "pregnant at 16" being glamorized on TV and the girls on the show being made famous and "celebrated". If we want to right our ship then we have to admit that all the people that focused on lyrics and images in video games and TV in the 70's and forward were right. Having those type of images and language being used as commonplace has lowered our cultural standards. And each successive generation has lowered them a bit more. I don't know how you put the genie back in the bottle but that is what needs to happen.
Yes. And yes. Plenty more to add like general increase and glorification of violence in entertainment. I'd summarize it all as more about 'what I want' and less about what is morally correct with less mechanisms to enforce the morally correct part. That means folks are more likely to take a gun and use it immorally than 70 years ago.
All true. Good thing the Republicans were on the scene to defend the country from all that stuff. Oh. Wait.
Got a ride from a guy when my cart ran out of gas at Port A this weekend and first bit of conversation between us he brought up how messed up things are now since trump is gone. He was more MAGA than me. He commented that when he was a kid you watched things like Roy Rogers on TV and things had positive messages. Not like the ‘sh**’, (his words) on now. Natural I agreed. He asked if I’d seen all the Trump flags on the beach. “How the heck did that guy lose”, he asked me? I just laughed. Btw, he was Hispanic.
Agree totally. Morality was invisible- both political parties equally to blame on this. Satan is a brilliant tactician, well, if you believe in that just mo.
No politicians from either party made us abandon our wives and children and stop going to church. We did that to ourselves.
I do believe in personal responsibility. But do you really think that the culture changed from the ground up? People just started to turn away from the truth and be more and more degraded with external influence? Did Germany descend into gross immorality and sexual degradation during the Weimar Republic just because people made decisions to do so? I don't. I see that there have been influences from intellectual elites. They made the "long march through the culture" since the 1930s in the US. The academic, educational, monetary, and financial systems have been wielded against the common people. The common people have been conditioned to act as "their betters" have told them to do. We see this with the increased numbers of gay and trans-kids in the last 5 years. Geographically the rates have changed much more where Leftists are in control to. Children are responding to what they are being taught in schools and in their entertainment. Individuals are responsible for the decisions they make. Individuals need to be held accountable for bad decisions or be made to suffer the consequences of their decisions. But this doesn't mean those who run our institutions are innocent and shouldn't be held accountable for what they have pushed onto the country for decades now.
Cultures are different. We have too much cultural relativism in our politics. All cultures are not equal. Some are worse than others. This has always been true throughout the world. Acting as if all cultures are equal is a huge mistake. Cannibalism comes to mind, but there are many examples. But in today’s PC world, you are not supposed to criticize another’s culture. The marketplace divides wealth and income, not some insidious master plan. Politicians don’t concentrate efforts on correcting processes, they state noble goals, and then institute policies that try and achieve those goals, but ultimately hurt the people they are trying to help. Take affirmative action and quotas/goals of hiring people of a certain color. The top fifth of blacks benefitted (harder working, better educated), but the bottom 60% went backward. Freedom was also curtailed for everyone involved. With exceptions for the poorest and most needy, welfare programs have a horrific effect on the people the programs were designed to help. As we also see, those programs have a negative effect on all of society. When politicians join strong community groups and begin to change bad cultures, we may be able to make progress. Ignoring cultural problems and just mindlessly repeating phrases such as “income inequality” before enacting counterproductive policies will never help. Take notice of the cultures that are successful in every country they live, whether they are a minority or a majority of the population in those countries.
I don't discount any of that, but on an individual level, it's no excuse. If you abandon your family, you're a garbage human being, whether the culture is telling you it's ok or not.
I don't attribute as much power to elites as some do. The implosion of belief in God(s) started in earnest in the 19th century and was a bi product of scientific research undermining some literal beliefs in scripture. World War destroyed millions and led to Hitler and Bolshevism It was not just Weimar that went into frenzy in the twenties During WW II the greatest generation cut loose and marital fidelity and family structure slipped considerably. The Conformist Fifties were a reaction, an attempt to return to normalcy. Prosperity and tv undermined that. Drugs and Vietnam Nam (courtesy of the Best and Brightest our Ivies could produce) pushed the wagon along What is driving the. Rush to suicide of the civilization now is a mystery to me
Your first sentence contradicts those following. Scientific discovery does not reduce belief in God on its own. It didn't in the 17th century when the Scientific Revolution happened. It didn't happen in the 18th century when the Industrial Revolution happened. It happened in the 19th Century once the intellectual and leadership class had been inculcated in a philosophy based on irrationality. It was that underlying philosophy that rejected the Bible, Western civilization, traditional morality, etc. It is the ongoing march of Leftist philosophy in our universities, government agencies, the entertainment industry, NGOs, etc. It started with Progressivism in the US in the late 19th century which came over from German universities in the mid-19th century. Then the Frankfurt School theoreticians were welcomed with open arms in the 1930s. They were all given money, high positions in academia, and leadership in different agencies. Government and NGOs supported their teachings. Their teaching directly caused the drug craze and the hippy movement in the 1960s. Those following in their footsteps have continued to chip away at the psyche of the US for decades. The mental ailments of today all come from that same vein of thought. If you read Herbert Marcuse from the 1950s and 1960s and other communist or neomarxists from the 1980s it becomes pretty clear.
I had never realized the hippies were adherents to the Frankfurt School. Or that Darwinism was a product of irrationality.
historically we had to spend much more of our days devoted to survival and that left very little for the type of entertainment of the last century. People have always been distracted by/attracted to, the unusual, the strange, the deviant....even if only temporarily to say "yuck" with a little more authority. It is only in the last century that this tendency became viable as large scale business opportunity. Drugs and prostitution have been around forever but they were typically hidden from polite society. Now we parade them on TV and music in the daylight hours in front of our kids as well. We have taken what used to be a small portion of our lives that most of us struggled against the temptation, and we have made them mainstream businesses that are very public and even prominent in some cultures. I blame Kevin Bacon and that dang dancing.
BOSD No rhythm? You make a good point . The bizarre is out there 24/7 as normal And We are the bizarre ones for not following in line
Hippies themselves weren't. They followed the ideas of Marcuse. He was on the fringe and the intellectual lead of the New Left movement. The hippies were downstream, but the point being the hippies didn't come up with that stuff on their own. Darwinism is a part of the rejection of God that happened in philosophy circles that started in the late 1700s. Philosophers split knowledge into 2 pieces. One piece was irrationality and it governed ideas about purpose, morals, values, and metaphysics. The other piece was hyper-rationality applied to natural sciences and then social sciences. It stripped away any supernatural ideas about human origins and human life. Humans were simply biological machinery. Darwin's ideas fit right into this philosophy.
