Posted on 02/25/2018 3:49:38 PM PST by Altura Ct.
OK, so why is the country falling apart? Specifically, why are kids blowing each other away? America has become a source of wonder the world over with its Colulmbines and hundreds and hundreds of dead in Chicago and Baltimore and its burning cities and riots. Other advanced countries don’t do these things.
America didn’t either until recently. Why now? Something has changed, or some things. What? People under under forty have never seen the country when it was sane. Let me point out things that have changed, at risk of sounding like a boilerplate cadger: “By cracky, wen I was a boy, we could amuse ourselves for hours with just a piece of string and a couple of sticks.” Let’s compare today with the Fifties and Sixties. I mean this as sociology, not nostalgisizing.
I think that a combination of social changes have led to tremendous stress on today’s kids that my generation did not suffer. To wit:
In my rural Virginia school, there was no racial tension. We were all white: teachers, students, parents.
The black kids went to their own school, Ralph Bunche. We had virtually no contact with each other. There was no hostility, just no contact. The academic gap didn’t exist in the absence of contact. Inintegration would prove cruel when it came. and the black kid s sank to the bottom. The causes can be argued, but the fact cannot.
There was no black crime to speak of or, as far as I knew any black crime. Certainly blacks did not shoot each other, or anybody. Neither did we. The reasons I suspect were similar.
Divorce was extremely rare, so we all had parents. Whether it is better that unhappy couples stay together or that they divorce can be argued, but they then did stay together. It made a large difference in outcomes if one accepts the statistics. The welfare programs of the Great Society had not yet destroyed the black family, which I speculate accounted in part for low crime.
Drugs did not exist. These appeared only with the Sixties. A few of us had heard of marijuana. I read a clandestine copy of The Naked Lunch. That was it. We drank a lot of beer.
In the entire school I remember only one, moderately fat kid. Why? Because, I will guess, we were very physically active. The school had PE classes, football and basketball teams, and so on. In summer kids aboard Dahlgren spent their days at the base swimming pool or swimming in Machodoc “Creek”{{it was perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide–bicycling, canoeing- playing tennis. The country kids chopped cord wood, lifted hay. There was ice skating for hours in winter. Gloria, my best girl, got up at four a.m. to help her father pull crab pots on the Potomac, Though feminine, she probably could have thrown a Volkswagen over a four-store building. Again, I offer this not as nostalgia but as biological fact with effects.
Physical fitness has. I suspect psychological consequences. For example, ADHD did not exist. Boys are competitive, physical animals full of wild energy and need–need–to work it off. Boredom and enforced inactivity are awful for them. Two or three hours daily of fast-break pick-up basketball did this. If you force boys to sit rigidly in school, with no recess or only physically limited play, they will be miserable. If you then force them to take Ritalin, an approximate amphetamine, they will be miserable with modified brain chemistry. I don’t think this is a good idea.
Sex and, I think, its psychological consequences were different then. We were aware of sex. I am not sure we were aware of anything else. But the culture was such that, first, young girls, middle school, say, were sexually (very) off limits. When barely pubescent girls are taken advantage of by boys of seventeen or of thirty-five, the emotional effects are devastating. By contrast, boys hoped desperately to be taken advantage of.
The de facto social theory was that girls should remain virgins until married. I think few really believed this, and certainly many girls did not. However the necessity of pretending, plus the fear of pregnancy in those pre-pill days, allowed girls to say “no.” if they chose. The Pill, backed up by abortion, would make girls into commodities. If Sally said no, Mary wouldn’t, and boys, churning jhrmone wads, would go with Mary. Thus girls lost control of the sexual economy and the respect that went with it. More stress.
Anorexia and bulimia did not exist. We didn’t know the words. Both look to me like a reaction to stress.
Uncertainty is a formidable source of stress. We had little uncertainty as to our futures in the sense that the young do today. We assumed, correctly, that jobs would be available for us. For kids who were not going on in school, there were jobs at Dahlgren, the local naval base, as secretaries or guards or maintenance personnel, federal jobs with benefits. More remotely, Detroit was paying what seemed to us astronomical wages. Those of us in the college track, which meant those whose parents were grads and those who had high SATs, knew we could work in whatever field we had chosen. Starbucks and living in our parents’ basements never crossed our minds.
Social mobility existed, and girls had not yet been taught they they were victims. Of my graduating class of sixty, two girls became physicists and my buddy Franklin, of non-college family an electronics engineer. Sherry a year behind me, a nuclear biologist. All, I think, of non-college families. There must have been others.
Extremely important, I think, was that the school was apolitical. We didn’t know that it was. School was where you learned algebra and geography, or at least learned at them. The teachers, both men and women, assumed this. The white kids were not endlessly told that they were reprehensible and the cause of the world’s problems. The boys were not told that masculinity was toxic. Hysteria over imaginary rape was well in the future. Little boys were not dragged from school by the police for drawing a soldier with a rifle. The idea of having police in a school would seem insane when it first appeared.
More speculatively: My wife Violeta recently commented that the young today seem about ten years younger than their age. There may be something go this. At least in the media and academic worlds, people in their mid-thirties remind me of the young of the Sixties, displaying what appear to be the same hormonal rebellion and sanctimony. It has also seeped into high school. There is the same anger, the same search for grievance, the same adolescent posturing.
I think feminism plays a large part in the collapse of society in general and specifically in pushing boys over the edge. In my school years boys were allowed to be boys. Neither sex was denigrated. Doing so would have occurred to nobody. Then came a prejudice against boys, powerful today
All of this affected society in its entirety, but especially white boys. They are constantly told that being white is shameful, that any masculine interest is pathological, that they are rapists in waiting. They are subjected to torturous boredom and inactivity, and drugged when they respond poorly. They go to schools that do not like them and that stack the deck against them. Many are fatherless. All have access to psychoactive drugs.
Add it up.
I think that what happened was that we told God to leave us alone. Bad idea, that.
Beginning 1949 -
https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/16/us/20-deadliest-mass-shootings-in-u-s-history-fast-facts/index.html
The Antichrist will have his empire in Europe, not the US. Satan has used the US as an ATM, and with his bag of cash and tech, he’s ready to set up camp over yonder. We have been past tense for some time.
ADHD still does not exist. It was created out of lazy parents wanting heir kids to not be kids. They want zombies that sit in front of a TV and make no sound.
Interesting read.
We can see from this, that many changes in recent decades have not been positive changes.
I don’t really agree with all of it but for the most part, right on. Feminism, I think, is the number one cause of the demise of civilized society. I mean, can you imagine even as little as 5 years ago, grown women wearing large, realistic twat costumes?
Someone pointed out the other day that today’s youth have grown up extremely cynical about the pillars of our society. It doesn’t help to see the current 24/7 hysterical negativity about the president to the point they have to spread lies about him. Truly damaging to our country.
Kids in fly over country were mostly in serious Sunday School and in then into the pew with parents for serious Church all Sunday mornings. No therapeutic warm and fuzzy churches then.
By the 60’s those of us raised in the wheat fields had still never even seen marijuana.
Our dads were WWII veterans and even my beautiful mother and gorgeous aunts were Rosie the Riveters, having traveled to the big cities where air bases held their men, during the week.
Religious people and no nonsense, but virtuous and hard working, patriotic. Our cattle ranch country and farmland education was the same.
All that mattered and America was Mega Great, until the frog began to boil and over time, much was shattered.
You start with the legalized killing of unborn children add hollywoods non-stop love affair with gun violence and death, mix with some prescription drugs or otherwise and a void of meaningful faith...and here we are.
Creeping Marxism ... period.
They set as their goal to overtake the schools in this country. “Political Correctness” ... an idea set forth by Lenin during the Bolshevik revolution was imported to this country.
It can be easily seen starting in the mid 60’s with the Drug culture, Free Sex, etc... Anything to destroy the norms of the USA.
Once the first batch of college kids were indoctrinated, it spread exponentially.
There was an epidemic when my kids were in school; kids that I had known from birth or shortly after were diagnosed left and right. Mostly boys, but the point I want to make is every single one that I knew personally seemed perfectly normal to me- and it was not the parents that “discovered” they were ADHD or even had concerns about their kids. The push was from the school!!
It was always the same thing, the teacher would approach the parents that “little Johnny” was having a hard time focusing in school and would benefit from a visit to the doctor. In this area it was a specific doctor in the nearest large town. The doctor would do tests and the child would be diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin. I don’t know of a single child that went and was not diagnosed and medicated.
I have my own idea that schools were getting money for Special Ed. students, and for some reason the money was great for ADHD. I say that because it took off like wildfire, the parents seemed hesitant but the school would push and it would happen in most cases. As it turned out medicated children are easier to handle so it ended up being a win/win...or seemed to be at the time. It became the thing to do, countless stories in women’s magazines and morning shows on TV also promoted it.
I think the school not only profited by all the ADHD diagnosed students, but there were other issues. Often funding is tied to test scores, and if a student was considered Special Ed. their test scores were not counted against the class average. The students that were recommended for treatment were average or below average students. At some point the rules changed and now only a certain percentage of students test scores can be left out of the test results. Amazingly enough the push to diagnose ADHD and drug children tapered off and it no where near as common as it was then.
Fast forward to the beginning of the meth epidemic- I had a long talk with a rehab counselor that told me nearly ALL of the patients he saw in rehab for meth had been diagnosed with ADHD and had been on Ritalin until they graduated from school and they would suddenly be denied new prescriptions. Now meth has been around long enough to have created its own following but in the beginning it was a refuge for former Ritalin drugged children.
Just my experience in my area but would not be surprised to find it was the same across the nation.
Later.
Agreed. Feminism is one of the biggest problems in America.
ADHD was created by public school teachers who wanted boys to sit down and be nice like little girls.
Yes, the school shave been the pushy ones. This has been going on at least since the 1980’s that I am aware of.
We are 8th in the incidence of mass shootings in the developed world, not first. Norway is No. 1. Our crime and murder rates are at multi-year lows.
This is media hysteria, not a “falling apart”.
Cigarette smoking was All over the place.
Priorities changed in the 80’s:
1. Divorce became the norm.
2. Mothers went to work so families could buy more unneccessary ‘stuff’.
3. Divorced (weekend) Dads substituted discipline with ‘buying love’.
4. Schools and TV became the parents.
Add 30 years to that:
1. Single parent homes is the norm.
2. All kids have I-phones, cable, I-Pads, their own TV, social media, and video games.
3. God is gone, values and morals (right and wrong) is defined by teachers and Hollywood.
4. Social Media has created an Anti-social culture. Evryone is looking at everyone else’s posts, but not engaging in a meaningful way.
5. Family unit: Parents pay the bills, kids do what they want, they are roommates. Parents are not parenting, they are babysitting.
Add to that the pressure to agree or be ostersized. The PC culture, the shaming, and the lack of critical thinking are visible everywhere. Children are raising themselves while parents chase a buck so they can buy unnecessary ‘stuff’ (bigger houses, cars, boats, wardrobes, fine dining, etc.)
How to fix it:
Change your priorities.
Don’t have a child out of wedlock.
Do not get married before 25.
Start working at 18.
Move out of your parents house at 18.
Spend most of your time with your children, quality time.
Children should not have phones (except for emergencies, not for fun), or be on the internet. Children should not be watching TV unsupervised. Children should have chores. Children should be taught, not babysat. Bad behavior should be punished, not excused.
If a parent ends up divorced, dating should be invisible to the child. Put the child first.
A child’s first support group is the family. With time, human interactions (playing, sports, hobbies, etc.) will create more support and self esteem. Chores teach responsibility and self esteem for a job well done. Punishing bad behavior teaches there are consequences for actions. Know what your child is doing and how he feels, be involved. It’s a simple formula
While this is a ‘big picture’ analysis, I hope it starts a conversation.
Sloppily written, but people with rose-colored glasses welded to their faces will eat this stuff up.
But then again a rural Virginia small town in the 50s(?) isn’t exactly a template for what most of the nation was even remotely like.
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