Friends, by no means is our country's bleak mood and its penchant for self-pity and depression concentrated solely among the young, but millennials are certainly on the leading edge of a harrowing trend. We've discussed this anomaly before: life has never been better, by most objective and material measures, but people don't feel better. In fact, a lot of them feel worse. We can blame the media for some of this melancholy, perhaps even most of it, but more is at work. Check out this article, which begins an important conversation about the emptiness afflicting so many lives these days. This is just Part One:
https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2020/01/21/why-are-so-many-young-people-unhappy-n2559793
What's your opinion on this psycho-social phenomenon?
Perhaps it is because they are hooked to their gadgets/phones 24/7? Seriously, like Prager stated the complete loss of values and I dare say morals. Also, another culprit, parents have stopped parenting and they are being friends with their children.
ReplyDeleteI could go on and state other things such as big government, rights, voting, women working etc. However, it is so easy to blame everything else than to basically look in the mirror. Change has to come from inside, not from outside. I wish it was that easy, but it isn't.
Dr. Waddy: First: I think the stats,as is so often (and unacknowledged)true these days, are misleadingly effected by evidence from sections of our society which are profoundly negative and ever so much so due to wrongheaded public policy meant to remedy dysfunction only very partially understood by the policy makers.
ReplyDeleteBottom line: all the advanced thinkers of the '60's beyond were full of it. Why of course, gee, a father and a mother ARE critical.
Perhaps today's young are largely a product of parents who lacked or disdainfully rejected, common sense. The result may be a generation unable and unwilling to face life as it is. Good going Boomers!
You both makes so many excellent points! Of course our malaise is multi-causal. I agree with both of you that parenting (or the lack thereof) comes very high on the list. A diminution of social skills can't be helpful. The lack of meaning in young lives, which flows from the irreligion and cynicism of so many of them, has to eat away at them. Linda, I think you are right to point to the changing role of women. That has meant enhanced opportunities for women, yes, but it also places many burdens on them, and no one is very clear these days on his/her/its social role. Jack, I couldn't agree more that much negativity flows from the active cultivation of negativity. Our culture is fixated on victimhood. No wonder many young people feel hard done by... But, in the end, I find myself agreeing with Linda's last point: we can shake our fists at social institutions beyond our control all we like, but ultimately each of us has responsibility for his or her own fate. If society is trying to mold us into moping socialists, well, we don't have to lie down and take it. Fight back, America! Grab hold of common sense, and don't let go! And don't forget to give thanks for God's bounty, because it really is bounteous, if you just stop to take notice. (Sermon complete.)
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy and Linda:I know a farm family with eight kids, all of whom are home schooled. They all have chorea and their parent's love and care for them is very obvious. Surprise, surprise, all you leftist academy "educated" social architects, these are the happiest kids I've ever met. The only mystery in all this is in the fog of presumptuous and summary humbug generated by the half baked '60s and in those who insist that it can still work if given enough time and other people's money. Buhhhhloney!
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy and Linda: That is "chores", not chorea.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy and Linda: I started my prison library career in 1983 at a prison located close to a state college which was closing its campus school. They offered me the free pick of any books from that library. It was an instructive if not not redeeming experience. So many bright iconoclastic tomes from the late '60's, extolling myriad innovative educational techniques designed to remedy the perceived consummate shortcomings of educators schooled in the pre'60's dark ages. And oh how alot of those '60's educated teachers, my contemporaries at a partly teacher's college, were entranced by these revelations. Oh well, they were boomers and thus harbingers of Aquarius, a new world. There were those exalted treatises, some 15 sooo long years later, free for my taking! Why, were they outdated? Surely they were not discredited?!! Perhaps they were not fresh and new enough. How do we explain this lack of staying power? Surely they were not the product of summary and shallow research and reasoning, no?
ReplyDeleteI may be excessive in my disdain for the wrongheaded"progress" engendered by the '60's but having lived through their beginning and their unimaginable end and their continuing baleful influence (Bernie?, Warren?, Biden?, the Clintons?, Schumer? and the disgracefully debased and debauched American academy, especially that of Law, and entertainment culture) I see the the '60's as a terribly bizarre interlude forced on America by a generation notable only for its arrogance and multitude. Yes of course many boomers have lived positive lives but we are disgraced by the multitude among us (and our generation as a whole was that numerous only due to the Greatest Generation having done its duty and enacting its subsequent joy in the expected manner)who have done our country and their parents everlasting wrong. Its still to be resolved: they could, even this year, complete their frantic campaign to give their lives meaning (they were unforgiveably denied this consummation in 2016) by destroying our country and replacing it with their hollow and effete vision.But we CAN stop them and we will in November if we stand true. This is the main test!
Brilliantly put, as always, Jack. I'm glad to hear that your home-schooling friends have produced model offspring. I don't doubt that the misguided, factory-line approach to mis-education in our public schools does tremendous harm to the young. Couple that with a debased popular culture, and what hope does any parent have? Isolating one's children from as much of this poison as possible seems like the only sensible course.
ReplyDeleteAnd you're so right about intellectual fads among educators and academics. They come into and go out of fashion almost as quickly as bell-bottoms and boy bands. That is indeed proof of the shallowness and emptiness of the Aquarian sect, as you suggest. One can't build a civilization on such bunkum -- but one can kill it by turning one's back on proven verities.
Dr. Waddy: A sincere thanx for your endorsement of my views. Linda: I am especially struck by your expression of concern for moral degeneration in America.
ReplyDeleteI often wonder how ever I could explain to my grandfather, who was born in 1897 and who fought in WW1 and died in 1968, should he return and see but one night of network television in 2020, how our audience can have been so debased as to tolerate such presumptuous and tawdry entertainment. To those who would dismiss that concern I would say: do you actually think the raw themes we so freely bandy about were unknown to previous generations? Silly you! They knew about them because they LIVED them but in public expression they placed them in settings tasteful, symbolic, suggested, reserved and reflective of the civilized rectitude due "country matters". "What, would you .... grossly gape on?" (Othello). Apparently so many of you enlightened WOULD!
You're so right, Jack. I recall my mother saying that her grandmother was mortified by commercials for toothpaste, because she saw that as a product of an intimate and personal nature. We're way past toothpaste now! There are so many norms we've discarded over the years, many of them time-tested and sound. Gender norms are an intriguing case in point. We've democratized and homogenized many behaviors and aspects of life, you might say, but at the cost of coarsening and in fact severely damaging relations between men and women, plus the institution of marriage. Alas, a norm, once trashed, is very hard to recover.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: Ideals,once tested, are often discredited as being proven unworkable or as productive of negative consequences. That's one perhaps understandable thing but to persist after such proof is obvious is evil. Its one reason I oppose modern day Marxists.Far too many of us have allowed a debased and cynical faction of our society to broadcast its debauched values by rewarding it with profit and even, shamefully, deference. We forbade our young daughter to obtain Brittany Spears recordings and told her " She does things she knows are wrong and wants you to think they are right and doesn't care about the harm she does." So much of our popular culture is dominated by leering, sneering, dysfunctional, drug addled sybarites who rejoice in debasing all they can reach. They are well aware of the destruction they have wrought and they are blithe to do what they want despite that certainty.Its little wonder they grace the indulgent left with their dismissive ennui and support.
ReplyDeleteJack, you're right that there is something deeply unhealthy about the intellectual, cultural, and political attitudes of many on the Left. At the center of their worldview is a preference for the dysfunctional over the functional, for the insane over the sane, for the criminals over the law-abiding, for the poor over the middle class and the rich, for the primitive over the civilized, for the faithless over those who believe...and I could go on. What mental defect causes an ideology like this? I've said it before: I think there is a species of self-loathing that lies at the heart of much leftist thinking. Where does it come from? I suppose it can only come from human nature in some form. Maybe we have an instinct for self-preservation (usually strong) coupled with a penchant for self-destruction (usually weak, but subject to cultivation by certain types)? Let's put our best conservative brain scientists on the case...so no one, in other words.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: What you have said above is very plausible. I would add to the list of reverse verities to which they subscribe: A preference for the unproductive (who are to them simply underprivileged and unfortunate; negative lifestyles are irrelevant except as proof of consummate virtue) and an instinctive animus to the productive (who are to them simply lucky: positive lifestyles are irrelevant except as proof of predation ). An iconoclasm which is in so many purely reflexive (2+2=4? Say you so?! That is numberist nonsense and is completely discredited because you assert it. 2+2= 5 and that is all there is to it and pretty soon we will make it a crime to say us nay. Think not? Ask E. Warren) is a terribly widespread malady among the '60's educated and beyond.
ReplyDeleteIt has been lived so long by multitudinous boomers throughout their prolix and onerous reign; they don't think, they "feel" and that's enough for them.