Where has all the civility gone!!??

I sat outside of my classroom Tuesday waiting for it to open. I was there early, and the class currently occupying the room would not be out for another 30 plus minutes.

So I sat and worked on my crossword puzzle and talked to a few of my fellow classmates who had also arrived early. A few girls were also waiting.

We were not the only ones waiting. There were other students waiting for their classrooms to open. They were sitting outside of their own classrooms.

I noticed two guys waiting for their classroom to open. They began to get very loud and one began cursing. One by one more and more people started to walk up. It got much louder.

Now I'm not one to walk around and be the curse police. But this wasn't ordinary cursing. This wasn't a slip. It was F this and F that. He began telling a story about an older woman at Wal-Mart that had gotten in his way.

As the crowd began to form around him. His stories and his cursing began to get even worse. "F that old woman at Wal-Mart. I should have run her over," the man said. The most upsetting part of this was that there were women around. What happened to chivalry? What happened to modesty?

I was on the transit bus late Wednesday night and heard similiar language. A woman got on with her two small kids. But two girls sitting right beside her did not seem to care.

They openly talked around their sex lives. And again I heard F this and F that. Right in front of small children. You should set an example and always remember your surroundings.

You are absolutely right. Civility and common decency are headed the way of the dodo.

That doesn't mean there hasn't always been profanity. I competed in athletics from the time I was in grade school through college and have always been around a lot of that, say in the footbal locker room, but never around girls. For that matter I never even liked it in the locker room.

Another change, I just recognized the other day is people's sense of humor is also going. I was around a group of older people and they all had a wry sense of humor.

Today's young people take everything so seriously.

The mass murder of the abortion mills is the highest penalty of liberalism. The higher taxes generated to support a cradle to grave welfare state for unwed mothers and their children and drug and alcohol abusers is another important cost. However, even if by some magic all the un-Constitutional decisions of the Warren Court and its successors were overturned and every act of Congress dated after January 3, 1931 were repealed, there would still be abortions (though illegal), unwed mothers, and drug and alcohol abusers. Laws friendly to traditional, Biblically based values can no more eliminate the problems caused by sinful behavior than modern legislation and judicial decisions can create a liberal utopia. Were abortions illegal, divorce made difficult, unwed mothers not rewarded for promiscuity, and the poor and the addicted not given a "value neutral" source of financial support, the numbers of aborted children, single parent families, illegitimate children, and substance abusers would no doubt decline. But all these problems existed in the Victorian Era and would continue to exist even in the unlikely event American society returned to such standards.

What makes a restoration of the traditional moral order unlikely is what is the greatest long term damage done by secular humanism and moral relativism, the virtual destruction of American public education. By any standard, the reasoning ability and overall knowledge of each successive generation of native born Americans have declined. The decline in educational standards began with the introduction of John Dewey's "progressive education" concepts in the 1920s. Even the "G.I. Generation" that fought World War II was affected, as their standards were lower than those of the "Lost Generation" born in the 1880s and 1890s. Each successive generation of Americans born in the 20th Century knows less and is less capable of independent thought than its predecessors. There are pockets of resistance, in the home school movement and the better private schools. However, over 90% of Americans are educated in the public school system, where even school districts serving affluent communities show the results of declining standards.

I am no fan of immigration, legal or not, and deplore the political establishment's lack of will in taking effective measures to control this nation's borders. However, one reason for the high volume of immigration of low skilled workers, mostly from Latin America, is the absence of 30-40 million Americans murdered by abortionists in the last 35 years. The large number of technically skilled, but legal, immigrants, mostly from East and South Asia is due to the inability of the American educational system to produce enough trained scientists and technicians for high tech jobs. Unprecedented levels of immigration are an end product of modern liberalism.

As for the hope that the immigrants and their sounder values will bail out this country, the unfortunate fact is that Latin and Asian "family values" are overwhelmed in the second generation by the "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" culture.

Only a spiritual and moral revival will save America from a future as a temperate zone Brazil and inferior status as a nation to other powers, especially China.

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