Progress…

?Billy Beck points up a quote last week…

“In my lifetime, we will see pedophiles protected by law, likely under the Americans With Disabilities Act.”
(Karen DeCoster Campbell)

Says Billy; ” do you doubt it?”

I don’t for several reasons. I’d like to get into a few of them here but first let’s look closely at the historical trend on this kind of thing.

I respond with a quote of my own to Billy.

“We have all had a moment when all of a sudden we looked around and thought: The world is changing, I am seeing it change. This is for me the moment when the new America began: I was at a graduation ceremony at a public high school in New Jersey. It was 1971 or 1972. One by one a stream of black-robed students walked across the stage and received their diplomas. And a pretty young girl with red hair, big under her graduation gown, walked up to receive hers. The auditorium stood up and applauded. I looked at my sister: “She’s going to have a baby.”

The girl was eight months pregnant and had the courage to go through with her pregnancy and take her finals and finish school despite society’s disapproval.

But: Society wasn’t disapproving. It was applauding. Applause is a right and generous response for a young girl with grit and heart. And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a thousand-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother and not good for us.

The old America had a delicate sense of the difference between the general (“We disapprove”) and the particular (Let’s go help her”). We had the moral self-confidence to sustain the paradox, to sustain the distance between “official” disapproval and “unofficial” succor. The old America would not have applauded the girl in the big graduation gown, but some of its individuals would have helped her not only materially but with some measure of emotional support. We don’t so much anymore. For all our tolerance and talk we don’t show much love to what used to be called girls in trouble. As we’ve gotten more open-minded we’ve gotten more closed-hearted.

Message to society: What you applaud, you encourage. And: Watch out what you celebrate.”
Peg Noonan

The upshot here is this….
As a matter of political discussion and as a matter of trying to find our bearings, we ask ourselves ” At what point did things get out of control?”
Most certainly the answer to that question is not the most recent societal change, the most recent time when we gave up our values our principles, Who We Are.
It is however the first time. Long ago.

And we, some of us, laughed at those who in that long ago time, warned us that this would happen…. that it would steamroll out of control and ruin us in the process.

I dare to suggest you that one of the reasons that we’ve failed so miserably in keeping our definitions of what is wrong, is that we have failed so miserably in keeping our definitions of what is right. And why?
It’s difficult to stand up for what is right… Facing ridicule from those that are wrong. We don’t want to be seen as out of touch or cruel are old fashioned mean, or what have you.

In letting that happen, we let evil in.

It’s now to the point where there is no act, no behavior, that you can’t find some politician, or some professor somewhere to trot out and defend that behavior and say with great passion that the behavior, however vile or criminal and anti societal is perfectly normal and that we shouldn’t judge the people that do it because it’s perfectly normal. One example.

Of course we know very well these days what the result of treating all cultures as equal is. 

But, where did this come from?

Consider G K Chesterton…

But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. 

Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book in which he insults it himself.

 He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. 

As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.’ (G.K. Chesterton,Orthodoxy, 1909)

Now, of course Chesterton is talking about the Russian Revolution.. but look closely and you’ll see many Americans doing precisely what he describes here, and unsurprisingly, many of them for the same reasons.

Now, ask yourself will Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump even make a dent in this problem? Because frankly, that’s the biggest problem we face.