Kommie kudzu.
Posted on 01/03/2013 8:06:48 AM PST by Kaslin
A few days ago, going through some memorabilia of my mother's, I found the original promotional material for this syndicated column, launched in 1993. I was billed as "A New Conservative Voice for Young Women!"
More than 17 years ago, I set out to explain how a Yale-educated young woman from a secular Oregon family could become a social conservative:
Every life is precious. It is better to care for your children than to kill them. Divorce hurts children; it also breaks apart life's most precious commitment -- a family.
Men and women are different. A society that pretends otherwise is not going to raise boys to be loving, reliable family men. Marriage is about settling for less but raising up an ideal much bigger and more important even than the most urgent whispered promises of romantic love.
Sex makes babies. Society needs babies. Babies need their mother and their father. Men and women need each other. We all need a strong marriage culture, whether we choose to marry or not.
If it is true that sex makes babies, then that is clearly the most important thing about sex, the thing around which a decent person or society will organize sexual values, behavior and norms.
If they saw clearly. If they were only told the truth. For of all the ways adult society can abandon the young, one of the worst is to ignore the key adult task of creating and sustaining a larger meaning for sex and sexual desire for young people.
My own baby -- the one who was born about the time my syndicated column launched -- will graduate from high school this June and go off to college in the fall.
As I lay down this syndicated column after 17 years, I do not plan to stop writing (readers can find me at MaggieGallagher.com). It is a good time though to reflect on the trends:
On every key measure, marriage is weaker. The consequences are more obviously unsustainable, yet culturally powerful voices are less willing to engage, and the power of porn and Hollywood to create our norms for family life is more triumphant than ever.
Since 1993, the proportion of children born out of wedlock has jumped from 31 percent to 41 percent -- mostly since about 2003. For women with only a high school degree or less, nonmarital childbearing is the new normal. Divorce has declined for the privileged; for everyone else, stable marriage has gotten to be even further out of reach.
Without a powerful ideal of masculinity that points men toward marriage and fatherhood, more and more young men are deciding the hard work of becoming marriageable is not worth it: Porn, beer, video games with the guys, freedom and fleeting sexual encounters are good enough.
The most urgent overlooked need is the deep need of boys for masculine ideals. If civilization refuses to provide any, porn and video-game makers will step in to fill the gap.
Why should young men work hard to become protectors and defenders of women and children when American culture -- and women -- tells them they are not needed in either role?
So in this, my final column, I say my farewell to optimism and my hello to hope.
What is the difference? Optimism is a prediction; hope is a virtue.
My hope rests on this: The truths to which I've dedicated my life, both professionally and personally, are too important to ignore, too foundational to be abandoned, too much a part of reality to be lost forever.
Do not abandon politics. It is one important means to create culture -- to name our shared reality.
But we need, as well, a next generation of culture creators, of storytellers, with the credentials to name reality: empirical social scientists, novelists, poets, preachers and filmmakers.
We need donors to invest in building the networks and communities through which such voices are born, flourish and give meaning to the lives of millions.
The future belongs to those of us with enough hope to rebuild on the ashes of optimism, a new American civilization -- uniting sex, love, babies, mothers and fathers in this thing called marriage.
Kommie kudzu.
Most of the “Good Romans” were dead or in exile by that time.
Those that remained were the ones who learned to like the boot they licked.
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is my guidebook for our current predicament.
I guess we can look forward to the President marrying a horse and setting fire to Washington.
With respect, unicorn, blow it out your ass. If you think America is a nation of bleating cowards, GO MOVE TO FRANCE WHERE YOU BELONG.
Either that, or stop allowing yourself to be brainwashed and hornswaggled by the MSM when it presents the distorted picture of an America that looks just like the MSM. Go READ at places other than FR, go READ the comments from people at MSM sites like ABC and CBS. Most of them -- like most of us here on FR -- write that they think liberalism and the liberal bias of the MSM, stink.
You are so gullible that you've allowed pop culture and the MSM to reduce YOU to a bleating coward.
Have you looked closely at the current FLOTUS?
When you try to tell someone about where things are going, the most common response is anger. They blame you for all the bad things, because you pointed them out.
A very basic human reaction. Kill the one who brings bad news.
I was off FR for about a month after the election debacle. I have changed my way of thinking about things. I am going to insulate myself against what is coming.
Kudzu is tasty, full of minerals, and high in fiber.
You've agreed elsewhere that people who use the legal drug alcohol to escape from reality are likewise cowards. What ought we do about the cowardice of people who use the legal drug alcohol to escape from reality? (Note that criminalizing the cowardice of people who use other drugs to escape from reality does nothing about the cowardice of people who use the legal drug alcohol to escape from reality.)
You naughty kitten!
Are you sure that such a large segment of Americans have it that "wrong"? And if you are so sure that you're awash in a sea of idiots, LEAVE AMERICA because you're sure as hell part of the problem as long as you stay here and preach the gospel that most Americans are losers.
I think the primary thing that's wrong is that average Americans, decent people who prefer limited government, and who make up the MAJORITY of legitimate voters, parents, and producers in this country, have been bamboozled by the impression created by pop culture and the MSM that they're the "little dog," when the reality is that liberals are the "little dog" in America, but who have vastly inflated representation in the MSM and pop culture.
ONE example, one of thousands, PLEASE think about it and dammit, kick yourself in the ASS and anybody else in the ASS who starts preaching the losing, whining, pathetic, suicidal line that "Americans are children and idiots who voted for Santa Claus." Okay? Here's ONE EXAMPLE of how pop culture and the MSM work their illusions:
Gun rights. Now, if you actually follow the links to anti-gun articles and opinion pieces in the media and at blogs, you will see where they are AVALANCHED with comments from people who are pro-gun rights and who absolutely cherish the 2nd amendment, and who are even now creating RECORD SALES in gun stores and waiting lines at shooting ranges. THIS is all stuff that the MSM ignores. Instead, the MSM and pop culture ABSOLUTELY present a portrait of America where being pro-gun is controversial and rare. That portrait is flat-out FICTION, and variations on this distorted portrait of American opinion are repeated everywhere from environmentalist sentiment to welfare and gay rights and every other liberal cause, but YOU and other gullible pesimist fraidy cat Frenchmen believe the worst of the majority of your fellow Americans.
That path is the path to hell. WAKE UP, start paying attention to what's really going on outside of the MSM and pop culture, and START HAVING MORE FAITH IN YOUR FELLOW AMERICANS.
“Annoyingly looking on the bright side since October, 2002.”
When the final history of the United States and western civilization is written, it will be recorded that radical feminism was the chief agent in destroying the American family...the chief underpinning of any society.
We cannot be bamboozled against our will, nor can the MSM affect our representations if we continually seek the truth; it is our responsibility to be eternally vigilant against those who misrepresent the truth to us. I dont think poorly of my fellow countrymen; I just believe that we have not been paying attention for the last 30 years or so, and now we are paying the price.
bump for later
The good old days are gone forever. The American vote was stolen and will go on being stolen and manipulated from here on out. Those in power are gonna pick whichever person they want to become president. Freedom and liberty died with this last election.
>>>But think, centuries from now, when its glory days shall be memorialized in song and story.<<<
I agree. There’s this science fiction novel inside me that always begins, “When America died, the world cheered, and when the cheering stopped, the world wept.”
I really do see us in the same category as Periclean Athens or the Roman Republic. And I agree that it appears that we are experiencing a similarly tragic end. I would guess the best outcome would be empire, then decline, but it would still be the end of this glorious experiment. We are indeed a light for the world, or at least we used to be, a model of how people could live together in freedom and harmony. Maybe in a thousand years someone else will look at our bones and carry on.
God help us.
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