If It Feels Right - NYTimes.com

If It Feels Right - NYTimes.com

If you have kids, this article is likely to bring you close to tears as it did me. If you have been a good enough and lucky enough parent so your kids have largely escaped the hammer blows that have destroyed our culture,   congratulations and thank you. Your kids may have a chance to lead us from this wilderness at some time in the future.

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.

The extended family, the church, the social organization (Chamber of Commerce, Elks, Kiwanis, etc), the local government, the state government, and far off and not much seen, the nation were all interlocking elements of where humans lived -- and thrived as the spiritual and moral beings we were intended to be. 


That is dead in the US and Europe now -- killed by moral relativism, public education transmitting the most vile and false "values" possible,  attacks on the family so numerous and extensive that much like the boiled frog, we have failed to even detect most of them, the destruction of our nation's Judaeo / Christian heritage, work and family ethic to now being only worthy of scorn and derision. 


It took us decades to get here -- William Buckley saw it coming in the 50's. We had a short slow-down and mild reprieve under Reagan, but the election of the Democrats in '06 and BO in '08 quickly dumped us over the edge. Our deficit of culture, moral fiber and religion is actually much more devastating and deadly than our many and horrible financial deficits. Those are "only money" -- the loss of the faith, optimism, the basic sense of American goodness, and our national moral compass is likely completely terminal. 


If some sort of a union survives in the space that was once America, it now looks certain that it will bear no resemblance to the spirit that was America.