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Originally Posted by sbriscoe
The responses, if any, on this topic will be interesting to say the least. Is the United States dying on the vine while we watch? Read the newspaper, watch the news (your pick of which news network), read the internet, news magazines, you name it. So much bad news, a guy in Florida commits suicide while on a webcam and many watch but few do anything of substance to prevent it. We dump millions into schools, and increase it yearly but education in the States is dismal at best compared to other developed nations. Freedom of speech is used more to spread trash and gossip rather than valid ideas. Christian speech is stifled in schools but other religions are hands off and protected. You cannot stop an Arab in an airport for fear of offending but you can search an old lady who wouldn’t know a gun if you showed it to her. If we are democrat we blame rising prices on the republicans and if we are republican we blame the democrats. Let’s blame the President even though the real power to control is in the Senate. A candidate for the Vice President is slammed for lack of experience but a Presidential candidate with no experience is hailed as the new Golden Child. We give money to corporations who have for years ripped of the consumer and when the consumer asks for help they are told no. We’ll protect the right to kill an unborn but put you in jail for mistreating an animal. If you are not of a liberal mind set then you have no right to speak your mind. We will spend billions on another country in trouble (Iraq-Afgan) but only if they have something to offer; other countries in need are ignored (African countries). I could go on and on; is it me or have we lost our way. Is it me or is this country slowly but surely going down the drain.
Your thoughts.
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Short-sighted, "holier-than-thou" essay, riddled with both factual inaccuracies and Christian-right presumptions of "how life should be". I gather from your follow-up posts that you are a member of the "older" generation. So really what it boils down to, I'm sorry to say is that you, sir, are a bitter old man. Or you sure as hell sound like one. I pray that when I am your age I do not fall into the habit of criticizing everything about the post-modern era, while fondly recalling how great things used to run "back in my day".
Is the US dying? Ummm, no. I do not view a woman's right to choose (a right, by the way, which exists in every industrialized democracy in the world) as an example of the "US dying". Nor does the fact that someone killed themselves while they were online phase me for a minute. How is this any worse than the stuff that used to go down back "in your day"??
Was your generation really that much more civilized than today's? Do you want to tell me priests didn't suck little boys' weenies back in the 50s and 60s and 70s, just because it wasn't on the front page of your hometown newspaper? How about civil rights protesters in the 1960s getting beaten to a pulp by cops with billy clubs?? Or all the ugly race riots, whether in Watts, or in the other cities? Yeah, your generation was really sensitive to the plight of the less fortunate
Here's a little news for ya: people have ALWAYS engaged in cruelty and barbarism, whether it was ancient Rome, the Holocaust, Pol Pot in Cambodia, or today's little genocides in Darfur and Sudan. In a historical context, I fail to see anything that much more troubling in today's world than the stuff that used to go down back in "the good old days". Times change, people don't. I'm sure some guy who was born back in 1910 could have put your same opinionated essay up in 1968, when Vietnam was raging, MLK and RFK were both assasinated, race riots were breaking out and the USSR had 10,000 nuclear warheads pointing to the US of A. He too, probably thought that the "US was dying". Guess what? We're still here.
No worse and no better. People will be people. All the same ugly crap went down during your generation. Maybe it just wasn't out in the open as much, or it wasn't part of the 24-hour news cycle that we have with today's internet and media, but all the same nasty ugly stuff that you are frowning upon has been an integral part of human society for the past 4,000 years. Just because you didn't read about child molestation in a 1950s or 60s newspaper doesn't mean it wasn't happening. It was just kept under wraps. And yet the "country didn't slip away from us" then, and I assure you us Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers won't let it slip away now either.
As for Freedom of Speech being "used to spread trash and gossip", instead of "valid" ideas: one person's "trash and gossip" is another person's "valid" idea. Who assigned
you to keep track of which ideas are "valid"?? For someone who claims to have spent 27 years defending our right to free speech, you sure do sound pissed-off about that free speech with your "trash and gossip" label
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As for the little "Christian speech is stifled in school" drive-by comment, here's another news flash: The Supreme Court long ago established the separation of Church and State in this country. No one is stifling anyone. You want your kid to pray in school?? No problem: send them to Catholic school or to Yeshiva, which are geared towards religious education. But do it on your own buck. Public schools are funded by the States' coffers, which are, in turn, the taxpayer coffers. Which means religion is not part of the official public school agenda. And just because you have a problem with that, it doesn't qualify as the country "going down the drain" in my book.