“I agree with you up to a point, but the work of Alfred Kinsey and the development of the birth control pill both preceded the hippies. Actually, the roaring 20s were one of the earlier signs that we were on the precipice of our downward moral spiral. All of it adds up to where we are now.”
I believe it started a long time before that, with the Enlightenment in the 18th Century. When you read about what some people did then, like Ben Franklin having an illegitimate son and feeling no shame, it is shocking.
The problem began when America lost its Puritan roots. We should go back to our tradition of the Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, and G-d’s laws in our heart.
Or, perhaps it started with the Civil War. There is plenty of evidence of young men who had never been farther than 5 or 10 miles from their homes being corrupted by the prostitutes of Washington, Chicago, Charleston, Richmond and other cities.
That was followed by the traditional American West with the saloon girl and brothels we see in movies today. Even a someone like Wyatt Earp (a famous “hero”), could marry a prostitute and openly live with a woman who was not his wife.
And then WWI, the jazz age and flappers, and WWII led to a further decline in morals, until today, “Anything goes,” (by Cole Porter, a homosexual, published in 1934).
Yes, the roots of today’s immorality go all the way back to the founding of America, and perhaps before that, It’s gonna be a big job to change it, but let’s give it a try.
This happened every year regular as clockwork.
They weren't the only people to do that.
BTW, not everybody made it back from the long hunt, and not all the women lived through brutal winters.
“...Yes, the roots of today’s immorality go all the way back to the founding of America, and perhaps before that, It’s gonna be a big job to change it, but let’s give it a try.”
I detect, shall we say, some sarcasm in your post. Vice has always existed and always will. The difference between now and then is that the boundaries in the past were far more clear. People strayed, but when they did, they knew they’d stepped over those clearly defined boundaries. If Benjamin Franklin had an illegitimate child, everyone understood that this was wrong. People did not shrug it off as something that everyone did.
A number of people today are relativistic and do not believe that there is such a thing as right and wrong, except as the individual defines it at any given moment. (I am not Christian, by the way.) The effects of this can be illustrated by the following. A professor who had gone to high school in the 1950s told me that kids then were concerned with running in the hallways, spit balls and talking in class. When I went to high school in the 1960s, out of a class of around 350 kids, maybe about 4 were experimenting with marijuana. They were the “far out” kids. Nobody got pregnant. The issue of guns and knives never even came up. I only know of one girl whose parents were divorcing, and even though her behavior was not that good, a lot of people sympathized with her because of the stress of the divorce.
Today, kids are concerned with STDs, including HIV/AIDS, being shot and drug and alcohol addiction. There is no comparison between this and issues with spit balls, running in the hallway and talking in class.
Tradition instructs us to disapprove of vice because some short-term thrill leads to unhappy long-term results. We reduce the probability of vice by disapproving of it, and if that strikes you as being overly Puritanical, so be it.