Western Civilization, a work ethic, and Christianity.
Moms at home to watch over the neighborhood and raise us to be polite, helpful, and honest (as well as could be expected, that is).
Neo-classical, Art Deco, Arts & crafts, etc. architecture, not the communist-block-minimalism.
Real food, and lots of exercise from playing outside.
Creeps and criminals were put in jail, with “the chair” for the worst of them.
etc.
I would love to have it all back again.
“Moms at home to watch over the neighborhood and raise us to be polite, helpful, and honest (as well as could be expected, that is).”
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Yup. The days when not only did someone else’s parents give you a verbal whatfor when you did wrong, when you got home you were in for another whatfor.
Back then there was a shared culture and shared ethic — family, community, work, church or synagogue. These have badly eroded.
My stepmother, a roaring liberal, feels that the Constitution is obsolete — it was based on the Judeo-Christian ideology. I said to her, “What do you want to replace it with?”
My childhood was about as far away from this man’s as possible. I grew up in a small town in the middle of the desert in southern California. Our torn had no grand edifices, and the only “lake” we had was one public pool. Even our library lacked the requisite Carnegie moniker. Our two-block downtown was comprised of unsung five-and-dimes and a Sears catalog salesroom—literally a one-room store where you could peruse the catalog to place your order and await the shipment that took weeks or months. Our theater was a one-screen cinema that rarely hosted premieres, but the Saturday matinee was filled every weekend. Hunting and fishing were primary passtimes, and boys carried pocketknives and most recieved their first .22 bolt-action single shot well before their tenth year.
So how is it that an Irish Catholic country boy raised in California can relate to some Chicago elite’s story? The character of a place is not dependent on the glory of its architecture, but on the character of its residents. Two forgotten phrases that were ubiquitous in that time were “common decency” and “don’t make a Federal case out of it.” People from diverse backgrounds melded into a common culture that respected people, property and propriety. Strangers weren’t afraid to call children out when they broke those boundaries, and that public reproof maintained an environment where children weren’t afraid of strangers.
Liberty flourishes only alongside self-restraint. Those boundaries persisted in America long after the courts decided that such values were better called discrimination. Unfortunately, those elites forget that discrimination is a good thing—a person needs nutrition, but should avoid ingesting poison.