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.
Agreed. I like Fred and wish he had at least run a spellcheck on the article. His experiences in Virginia tracked pretty well with mine in north Texas, with the exception of the athletics. It was easy to avoid taking PE classes, and I took full advantage of it, as did others.
Schooling didn’t include economics because it was too ‘depressing.’ Evolution was glossed over, if not ignored completely. Calculus was a college thing.
Being the children of the WWII generation, we thought it only natural to go into the military, and virtually everyone I knew did. Patriotism meant more than waving a flag.
Merle Haggard’s Okie From Muskogee is an accurate portrayal of the time, though Merle now claims the song was a send-up. I think he just wants to please his leftist friends.
The family units dissolved. Fathers disappeared and kids became single mothers while in the 10th grade or even earlier. The schools facilitate that with on campus child care.
Kids learned to exploit their entitlement and learned to use it as a weapon. They did incredibly mean and cruel things to each other then claimed it was a "prank" and they "didn't know what they did was wrong".
Helicopter moms supported their kids in almost all cases against the institution when issues were brought up. There wasn't a future felon that wasn't an angel in their mother's eyes.
Kids learned how to become victims in search of recognition or revenge. They learned they could manipulate the legal system and the media in ruining a career. Teachers became afraid to do routine classroom discipline for fear of revenge slander that media readily picked up but rarely retracted if proven false.
Entertainment music and TV has become progressively more ethnic and violent and it presented adults and authority figures as non-functional idiots while kids were always the smartest people in the room. There isn't a school function that isn't full of ghetto talk and attitudes. That includes football half time shows and school plays.
And, the drugs...rampant and covering the spectrum both legal and illegal. The dealers are worshipped by the kids as "cool".
I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and never encountered marijuana until I entered college in 1969. To this day, I have never used it, even though my college was Barack Obama's alma mater.
Violent video games, electronic technology, no (any season) outdoor activities, food additives/junk food, rap music/thug culture.
Oh, yeah—if only we could go back to segregated schools.
Are you crazy?
Ping. Interesting.
The bane of our society.
I saw this happening back in the 80s and told my wife that the NEA and AFT were trying to wrest control of our children from the nuclear family to the Government. I also told her there was going to be a very bad kickback towards them as the entire teaching establishment was corrupt and had a collective IQ of -50. Too many teachers were young, female, and were graduates with "degrees" in Education, which meant they knew nothing.
As school and Government policies started taking away certain controls from the parents (back then the NEA actually announced that teachers were better prepared and educated to be custodians of all children than biological parents) parents started to let the teachers raise their children.
Since the entire teaching establishment was not actually capable of raising even one child, let along the entire Country, children started to misbehave and the kickback against the teachers started. The teachers then started to whine that parents weren't doing their jobs, not noticing the irony that they were the ones who tried to take the parenting jobs away from mom and dad.
We now have the mess we are in today.
bump
As it stands, comparing the youth of our past who protected, defended and made America great, these kidiots will conversely destroy our nation if there is no hard hitting answer to the left.
Psycotropic drug use happened.
bflr
BUMP
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269251/my-sister-kate-destructive-feminist-legacy-kate-mark-tapson
Above explains alot.
Very good article.
Are you crazy?
D@man straight the could lead to Black Student Unions or Congressional Black Caucus and stuff like that.
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