The Rapid Decline of Decency and Morality in America

I’ve been having this conversation with family and friends with increasing frequency - we are a nation with rapidly decreasing morality and decency.

Maybe I’m showing my age, but things that are going on now were almost unheard of when I was a boy, and if they did happen, they were dealt with swiftly and harshly, most often by our parents.

Our immorality and indecency has most recently been displayed by the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  Liberalism, predictably, has responded with an emotional knee jerk reaction - blame the machinery and not the person.  Either they are supremely naive or are being decadently opportunistic and are using this tragedy to further their short sighted agenda. I'm guessing it's both.

Public policy has wound up encouraging fatherless families, though families might be the wrong term.

Public policy is encouraging greed, jealousy, envy, egotism and irresponsibility (a la Sandra Fluke).

We kill innocent babies by the thousands and are told that it’s our “right.”  (I wonder how many of the pro-choicers are against the death penalty for first degree murderers?)

We have at least a second generation of school children who are not allowed to be taught morality, right and wrong, good and evil or, heaven forbid, God (unless you’re a conservative, then you’re always wrong and evil).  We are, instead, teaching them that life should not have hardship, that they shouldn’t have their feelings hurt, that the world revolves around them, that they are “special” and they are somehow owed all the good things in life.  Then when they get out of school and into the real world, they find out that most of what they’ve been taught isn’t true.  Now, not having any sense of decency or right or wrong or any kind of moral direction, they act out because they have not been taught how to deal with adversity.  We, as a society, then have the audacity to act surprised.

I could go on, but, in the interest of some kind of brevity, let me cite some examples that I have culled from a couple of sources, some of which you may be familiar with.  I’ll supply links to the articles, but I’ll also list a few of the “highlights” (or low lights) of the articles.

Signs Of Collapse: The Obvious And The Hidden

A gang in D.C. recording the terrorizing Metro riders, then proudly posting it on social media.

“Flash” mobs running in to stores and stealing everything they can as fast as they can.

“Knockout games,” where someone approaches a complete stranger and punches them just to see if they can knock them out.

More Evidence Of Impending Societal Collapse

A 65 year old priest, pepper sprayed and robbed.

A restaurant diner who had to wait too long so set the restaurant’s Christmas tree on fire and left.

A fight over a shopping cart that resulted in a beat down.

And from a primarily financial web site (financial?) - 20 Shocking Examples Of How Sadistic And Cruel People Have Become

11 dead and skinned puppies found in a park in Pennsylvania.

Nativity statues of Jesus and Joseph beheaded by vandals.

A 10 year old starved to death then his body dumped into a creek.

A debt collector telling a disabled vet that he should have died because he’s a parasite on society.

There are many examples in the above articles, I have listed only a few from each.

For a (fortunately) brief time we had a young man living next door to us who had frequent visits from high schoolers. For many of these visitors, if it wasn’t for the f word, they wouldn’t be able to talk.  The girls with them weren’t much better.

I'm sure all of you can come up with your own long lists of moral collapse.

I don’t claim to have the answer for our declining decency, but, as a parent who removed our children from public school at an early age, I think a good start would be a complete overhaul of the education system in this country.

If anyone has better ideas, please share them with us!