Posted on 09/29/2009 7:16:25 PM PDT by The Ignorant Fisherman
Many Americans today look out the windows of their self-centered, narcissistic lives and say, “How did we get to this point in our country?” To ask the question is to answer it. Because of our day’s stormy and dreary moral and social climate, people begin to look for scapegoats for all their ills. They rarely start by looking in the mirror.
Americans today - more so than at any other time - are mostly oblivious and ignorant of history and the changing philosophies of what brought us to this point. They are stuck in the mire of today’s social climate and cannot see past it. It is difficult to see when immersed in a rapidly decaying cultural environment.
Many events have set the stage for the decadent social conditions that now confront us. A step backward is needed to “put all the pieces” on the table for objectively analyzing and observing such trends and influences on American culture and society.
When America began to abandon its Judean-Christian values by forsaking Holy Scripture truth and the Person of Almighty God, our nation’s foundation began to fracture while the poisonous waters of godless influences subtly leaked into and permeated our culture. This slow and steady tide began to turn into a steady intensifying river, which opened wide the doors to the secular liberal and progressive ideologies and trends of the 1870’s, the promotion of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, Marxist Ideals, the “Roaring 20’s”, Eugenics, Freudian psychology, The Scopes trials, Secular Rationalism, etc.
(Excerpt) Read more at theignorantfishermen.com ...
1962 the cars continued to evolve as more compacts appeared and sold well in the US.
The Cold War continued to worsen when the Russians placed Ballistic Missiles on Cuban land just 90 miles away from the coast of Florida in and JFK called the bluff by threatening war unless they were removed which they were but for a short time the world was on the brink of nuclear war and self destruction.
The president then set a goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade and became more involved in politics in Southeast Asia by training South Vietnamese pilots.
Folk music was evolving into protest music thanks to young artists like Bob Dylan and the birth of Surfing music by the beach boys grew in popularity meanwhile in England the Beatles record the single “Love Me Do”. The new hit on TV for that year was “The Beverly Hillbillies” and the first of the James Bond movies “Dr No” was an instant success, some of the other movies released included “Spartacus” and “El Cid”.
I’m of the opinion that the height of American power was when we went to the Moon. That’s when we saw American exceptionalism combined with the max potential of the effects of winning WWII realized.
It hass been all down hill ever since, with exception to a few bright spots.
Basically they took whatever your budget was this year, and added 11% for next year.
No assessment of results, no review of money spent or needed, just tack on 11% every year.
This doubles the size of the government every 7 years.
When the republicans tried to add ONLY an additional 6% every year (1995) the idiot presstitutes screamed about the 'draconian cuts' in spending, even though no actual real cuts took place- still a 6% increase.
I dont know if the democraps raised it back to 11%
Wow..were you around then? it sounds like you were.
The tumble began with the first gas crisis and the “free love” movement of the stinking hippies. And the drugs that came with that putrid crowd.
America’s current mass immigration mess is the result of a change in the laws in 1965. Prior to 1965, despite some changes in the 50’s, America was a low-immigration country basically living under immigration laws written in 1924. Thanks to low immigration, the swamp of cheap labor was largely drained during this period, America became a fundamentally middle-class society, and our many European ethnic groups were brought together into a common national culture. In some ways, this achievement was so complete that we started to take for granted what we had achieved and forgot why it happened. So in a spasm of sentimentality on the Right and lies on the Left, we opened the borders.
Born of liberal ideology, the 1965 bill abolished the national origins quota system that had regulated the ethnic composition of immigration in fair proportion to each group’s existing presence in the population. In a misguided application spirit of the civil rights era, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations saw these ethnic quotas as an archaic form of chauvinism. Moreover, as Cold Warriors facing charges of “racism” and “imperialism,” they found the system rhetorically embarrassing. The record of debate over this seismic change in immigration policy reveals that left-wingers, in their visceral flight to attack “discrimination,” did not reveal the consequences of their convictions. Instead, their spokesmen set out to assuage concerned traditionalists with a litany of lies and wishful thinking.
Chief among national concerns was total numeric immigration. Senate floor manager and Camelot knight-errant Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, assured jittery senators that “our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually.” Senator Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, further calmed that august body, insisting “the total number of potential immigrants would not be changed very much.” Time has proven otherwise. Average immigration levels before the 1965 amendments took effect hovered around 300,000 per annum. Yet 1,045,000 legal immigrants flooded our cities in 1996 alone.
The 1965 “reform” reoriented policy away from European ethnic groups, yet implemented numbers similar to 1950’s rates in an attempt to keep immigration under control. However, Congressmen managed to miss a loophole large enough to allow a 300 percent in immigration, because they did not take into account two “sentimental” provisions within the bill. Immediate family members of U.S. citizens and political refugees face no quotas. Their likely impact on the nation was ignored, presumably because aiding families and the dispossessed cast the right emotive glow.
Yet leftists could sound like hard-nosed defenders of the national interest when necessary. In urging passage of the 1965 bill, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, D-New York, wrote in a letter to the New York Times, “The time has come for us to insist that the quota system be replaced by the merit system.” As if merit is the operative principle along the Rio Grande today! Similarly, Representative Robert Sweeney, D-Ohio, insisted the bill was “more beneficial to us.” In fact, the 1965 bill made “family reunification” - including extended family members - the key criterion for eligibility. These new citizens may in turn send for their families, creating an endless cycle known to sociologists as the immigration chain. The qualifications of immigrants have predictably fallen. Hispanic immigrants, by far the largest contingent, are eight times more likely than natives to lack a ninth-grade education, and less than half as likely to have a college degree.
The bill did not end discrimination based on what President John F. Kennedy called “the accident of birth.” (This of course begs the question of whether birth within the nation, the basis of common national community, is just an accident, but let that pass for now.) It de facto grossly discriminates in favor of Mexicans and certain other groups.
Not only has the bill failed in its stated purpose, it has realized many of its critics’ worst nightmares. Concern mounted that this bill would radically change the ethnic composition of the United States. Such things were still considered legitimate concerns in 1965, in the same Congress that had just passed the key civil rights legislation of the 1960’s.
Specific influx predictions that were made seem tragicomic today. Senator Robert Kennedy predicted a total of 5,000 immigrants from India; his successor as Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, foresaw a meager 8,000. Actual immigration from India has exceeded by 1,000-times Robert Kennedy’s prediction.
Senator Hiram Fong, R-Hawaii, calculated that “the people from [Asia] will never reach 1 percent of the population.” Even in 1965, people were willing to admit that we have a reasonable interest in not being inundated by culturally alien foreigners, and it was considered acceptable to say so on the floor of the Senate. Try that today, even as a supposed conservative! (Asians currently account for three percent of the population, and will swell to near 10 percent by 2050 if present trends continue.)
The only remaining Congressman who had voted on the 1920s quotas, Representative Emanuel Celler, D-New York, insisted, “There will not be, comparatively speaking, many Asians or Africans entering this country.” Today, the number of Asians and Africans entering this country each year exceeds the annual average total number of immigrants during the 1960s.
Yet the largest ethnic shift has occurred within the ranks of Hispanics. Despite Robert Kennedy’s promise that, “Immigration from any single country would be limited to 10 percent of the total,” Mexico sent 20 percent of last year’s immigrants. Hispanics have made up nearly half of all immigrants since 1968. After a 30-year experiment with open borders, whites no longer constitute a majority of Californians or residents of New York City.
As immigrants pour in, native Americans feel themselves pushed out. In 1965, Senator Hugh Scott, R-Pennsylvania, opined, “I doubt if this bill will really be the cause of crowding the present Americans out of the 50 states.” Yet half-a-million native Californians fled the state in the last decade, while its total population increased by three million, mostly immigrants. This phenomenon also holds true in microcosm. In tiny Ligonier, Indiana, (population 4,357) 914 Hispanics moved in and 216 native Americans departed during the 1990s. Hispanics now outnumber the Amish as the area’s dominant minority.
Thirty-plus years of immigration at historic levels have also had an economic impact on America. In 1965, Ted Kennedy confidently predicted, “No immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge.” However, political refugees qualify for public assistance upon setting foot on U.S. soil. The exploding Somali refugee population of Lewiston, Maine, (pop. 36,000) is largely welfare-dependent. Likewise, 2,900 of Wausau, Wisconsin’s 4,200 Hmong refugees receive public assistance. In all, 21 percent of immigrants receive public assistance, whereas 14 percent of natives do so. Immigrants are 50 percent more likely than natives to live in poverty.
Ted Kennedy also claimed the 1965 amendments “will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.” Teddy cannot have it both ways: either the immigrant will remain unemployed and become a public charge, or he will take a job that otherwise could have gone to a native American. What is presently undisputed - except by the same economic analysts at Wired magazine and the Wall Street Journal who gave us dot-com stocks - is that immigrant participation lowers wages.
Despite the overwhelming assurances of the bill’s supporters, the 1965 Immigration Reform Act has remade society into the image its critics most feared. Immigration levels topping a million a year will increase U.S. population to 400 million within 50 years. Meanwhile, exponents of multiculturalism insist new arrivals make no effort to assimilate; to do so would be “genocidal,” a notion that makes a mockery of real genocides. Instead, long-forgotten grudges are nursed against the white populace. Native citizens take to flight as the neighborhoods around them, the norms in their hometowns, are debased for the convenience of low-paid immigrants and well-heeled businessmen. All the while, indigenous paychecks drop through lower wages and higher taxes collected to provide social services for immigrants. And this only takes into account legal immigration.
These results were unforeseen by liberals easily led about by their emotions. Others were not so blind. Jewish organizations had labored since 1924 to unweave national origins quotas by admitting family members on non-quota visas. The B’nai B’rith Women and the American Council for Judaism Philanthropic Fund, among other Jewish organizations, supported this reform legislation while it was yet in subcommittee in the winter of 1965. Roman Catholics had the twin motivations of still-evolving social justice doctrine and the potential windfall of a mass influx of co-religionists from Latin America. Other organized minorities pressured for increased immigration to benefit relatives in their homelands. The ultra-liberal Americans for Democratic Action, the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild joined the chorus. Further, the Communist Party USA supported higher immigration on the grounds that it destabilizes working Americans.
Americans must realize demographic trends are not inevitable, the product of mysterious forces beyond their control. Today’s population is the result of yesterday’s immigration policy, and that policy is as clearly broken as its backers’ assurances were facetious. A rational policy will only come about when native Americans place the national interest above liberal howls of “prejudice” and “tribalism.”
“JFK called the bluff “
JFK did not know that there were several live nuke warheads on Cuba. The Russian commander there was urging Khrushchev to use them or lose them, while LeMay was ordering the B52s to head for Russian airspace then turn back, then turn towards Russia, which JFK did not find out about until later. We were closer to the brink than most know because of JFKs stupidity and reliance on the Attorney General’s advice (his brother) discussed in a WDC cafe.
And to resolve it we agreed to dismantle our Turkish bases, close many “listening posts”, and stop the silly concept of Civil Defense, as well as several other frank concessions we called “victory”. The Russians promised to remove missiles, but not launchers, from Cuba.
The Russians then flew armed bombers to Cuban airstrips, flying them down our coast so we’d be sure to notice.
I wasn't yet born back then, but my father was a Vietnam Vet. While I was growing up I found myself hating the hippies, and that entire "peace movement" because of the destruction they helped bring upon our country, culture, and military. I remember when I was a child hearing my late grandfather, who was a WWII vet, ranting about how the 60s, and those "dammed hippies" are what ruined our country.
Extensive statistics quantifying America’s decline, so that we may stand in the way, and as for the old paths, and walk therein. http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/RevealingStatistics.html
Those dang long-hairs!
There is a great histroy book called From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun.
Here is a quote from a review of that book, published in 2000, commenting on Author Barzun’s view::
‘He is convinced that our age, despite its extraordinary technological capabilities, is an Alexandrian age: a time of cultural sunset, depleted energies and moral confusion. His summary of what he calls “our present decadence” shows that he does not regard decadence as a neutral historical fact but as a cultural, moral, and political disaster of the first order.’
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/history/historian/Jacques_Barzun.html
The progressive ideologies began in earnest in the 1890 to 1910 period. Was godlessness permeating our culture at that time?
One must not underestimate the influence of education and the media. “Train up a child in the way he should go” has its counterpart, and the devil implements it.
In education in early America, the overtly Christian “New England Primer” was used in New England, which is estimated to have sold upwards to 3,000,000 copies from 1700 to 1850. This reader was used in what now would be 1st grade, and was introduced in 1690 and taught many children how to read for 200 years, until 1900. The Alphabet was taught with Bible verses that began with each letter of the alphabet. Lessons had questions about the Bible and the Ten Commandments. An example of the Primer is, A = In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. B = Heaven to find, the Bible mind.” (The Honorable Judge Robert Ulrich Chief Justice, Missouri Court Of Appeals, Western District; http://www.shalomjerusalem.com/heritage/heritage19.html)
In addition, approximately half of all American children (beginning in 1836 to approx 1930) learned from the “McGuffey Reader,” of which 122 million copies were published (during a time when the population was much less than today, and books were passed on more). This was an advanced teaching system for it’s time, written by a man who later became a Presbyterian minister, a work which earned him the title, “the Great Schoolmaster of the Nation.” He exalted the Lord Jesus Christ, and used the Bible more than any other source. It became a unifying force in American culture, instilling basic Christian-based morality, giving America a common value-laden body of literary reference and allusion, (Cranney, A. Garr, “Noah Webster and William Holmes McGuffey: The Men and Their Contributions to Reading”) and “a sense of common experience and of common possession”. (Historian Henry Steele Commager) McGuffey Readers were used widely in America until just after World War I.
The first elementary schools also taught Christian morality, and even the Unitarian “the Father of the Common School,” Horace Mann (May 4, 1796 — August 02, 1859), who became Massachusetts Secretary of Education in 1837, not only understood the impossibility of separating education from religious moral beliefs, but held that it was lawful to teach the truths of the general Christian faith, asserting that the “laws of Massachusetts required the teaching of the basic moral doctrines of Christianity.” Mann, who supported prohibition of alcohol and intemperance, slavery and lotteries, (http://www.famousamericans.net/horacemann) dreaded “intellectual eminence when separated from virtue”, that education, if taught without moral responsibilities, would produce more evil than it inherited. (William Jeynes, “American educational history: school, society, and the common good,” p. 149, 150) Mann stated that “it may not be easy theoretically, to draw the line between those views of religious truth and of Christian faith which is common to all, and may, therefore, with propriety be inculcated in schools, and those which, being peculiar to individual sects, are therefore by law excluded; still it is believed that no practical difficulty occurs in the conduct of our schools in this regard.”To critics who were alarmed at the concept of secular schools, he assured that his system “inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible...,” but he did exhort that Bible reading be without comment to discourage sectarian bickering. (Mann, Twelfth Annual Report for 1848 of the Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts. Reprinted in Blau 183-84.
Considered second to Mann in his schooling endeavor was Henry Barnard, who was raised in a deeply religious family, and saw his involvement in education “as part of the providence of God”. Like the majority of Americans, he believed that democracy and education went together in “the cause of truth—the cause of justice — the cause of liberty— the cause of patriotism — the cause of religion.” (Jeynes, p. 154)
While America was blessed by Christian educators and those that overall upheld the teaching of Biblical morality, the devil also has his disciples, and one was named John Dewey, head of the Teachers College at Columbia University from 1904 to 1930. He also taught in Peking University in China, and after that in Turkey. After he returned to America, in 1933 he signed (along with 34 prominent Americans) the Humanist Manifesto, which he helped to author. The first manifesto talked of a new “religion”, and referred to humanism as a religious movement meant to transcend and replace previous, deity-based religions. This was the Americanized version of the Communist Manifesto (sadly written by a soul with a root of bitterness, Karl Marx, and through which many were defiled: cf. Heb. 12:15).
Humanism in America is partly credited to a Unitarian preacher named Charles Potter who created the First Humanist Society of New York in 1929. A year later he penned “Humanism: A New Religion. In this declaration he boldly declared, “education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
Dewey became the father of modern American education, and he and his disciples worked to change the basic moral belief system that undergirded the moral educational system, in which [when the Engel v. Vitale case was decided] an estimated 75% of the school systems in the South had religious services and Bible readings (Colliers 1961 Yearbook p. 224). Rather than implicitly and often explicitly recognizing that God and the Bible were the ultimate authority on what was right and wrong, Dewey wrongly believed that it is the State that ultimately determines morality. Replacing the transcendent proven source of true liberty and it’s necessary limits (the Bible) with the social engineering of secular humanism, allows a nation’s school children to be indoctrinated with an ever morphing morality, which progressively calls evil good and good evil. In 1962 (in Engel v. Vitale) and in 1963, (in Abington versus Schempp) respectively, officially sanctioned prayer and devotional Bible reading were outlawed by the U.S Supreme Court in America public schools. This decision, coming over 170 years after the First Amendment was adopted (Dec. 15, 1701), essentially claimed a new “revelation” on what the Founders meant by it. Fisher Ames, the founding father who offered the final wording of the First Amendment, wrote an article for a national magazine in 1801, protesting the increasing marginalization of the Bible in the classroom, arguing, “Why then, if these new books for children must be retained, as they will be, should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a school book?” (Fisher Ames- Bible in the classroom. Notices of the life & Character of Fisher Ames; Boston: T.B. West & Co. 1809 pp. 134-135) What has followed these two decisions, which came at the beginning of the sexual revolution, has been a series of church-state cases in which the court has often been been closely divided, with, in the words of one Court observer, “contradictory principles, vaguely defined tests, and eccentric distinctions.” While the American schools system enabled rich and poor to obtain free or affordable public schools, so that Oscar D. Robinson, the principal of the high school in Albany, New York, declared that “the famous simile of the educational ladder, with its foot in the gutter and its top in the university, is in this favored country no poetic fancy,” it is increasingly evident that the gutter is now much in the schools, with higher education being noted for rampant sexual promiscuity and the promotion of the manifestly destructive liberal philosophies behind it, along with inflated grades, and the marginalization of core subjects. (Walter E. Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University: “What Will They Learn For Your $50,000?”) More here: http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/CauseEffect.html
And today:
Why Did The Unions Today Choose 7 Million Illegal Aliens Over 7 Million Unemployed Americans?
By Roy Beck, Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 11:16 PM EDT
There's no such creature as a "Judean-Christian America".
Vatican II opened in 1962. So goes the Church, so goes the world.
No it wasn’t yet... but the movement started to take hold and Liberalism started to infiltrate the “churches” and society. as time went on and this ideology began to pick up speed we find ourselves at the final exponential state of today.
My friend, godlessness is the absence of God in ones existence and the absence and rejection of the eternal absolutes for time and eternity found in God Book...The Bible. when one rejects these Divine instructions and absolutes..one is godless.
Thanks for your insight and some great links!!
DJP I.F.
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