State of the Union, Part II

I'm jotting this on Wednesday afternoon to be posted Thursday.  Scout's honor, I haven't heard what our President will discuss regarding the state of our United States. 

In the first part of this post (here), I looked mostly outside our borders.  International politics, military, and the economy.  While the last one extends overseas, our understanding of economics and the government's role therein will affect our reach beyond our shores.

Let's turn our eyes inward.

Personal responsibility.  It stinks.  Think back to the settlers who headed west.  Their success or failure depended solely upon...them.  No government bail-outs.  No medicare.  No education.  Zip.  Go further back to those who crossed an ocean to start a new life with little more than the clothes on their backs.  Did they demand that the new land accomodate their foreign language?  No, they found folks of like mind and similar tongue to help them get assimilated into the new country.  Some never left Ethnictown, but most did and became Americans.  Not Italian-Americans.  Not Irish-Americans.  Not Japanese-Americans.  No, the primary label they wore, and wore with pride, was that of American.

All of these folks depended upon their own industriousness and should they need a hand, they did not turn to the government.  They turned to their neighbor.  They turned to their family.  They turned to their church.  And that need was generally brief, until such time as they could return to independent productivity within society.

We have developed a government addiction.  We believe we need a grotesquely obese bureaucracy to ensure folks have medical care, to guarantee an educated populace, and to make sure we don't breathe second-hand smoke.  No, it's my job to keep an eye out for me and my family.  You need my help?  Just ask.  Please, don't pick my pocket.  To our legislators state and national, we must ask them to slay the beast.  Were our governments all quartered, they'd still be too bloated.

Only in our willingness to accept responsibility for our own destinies can we even begin to restore our freedoms.

Culture.  What we have seen happen in our government, that we have ceded our responsibilities and the government has metastacized, has happened in our culture, too.  As we have released the moral leash within our own lives, Hollywood has continued taken that license to inject our entertainment full of such things that would not have been mentioned in our grandparents' day.  Is that a good thing?  No.  Francis Schaeffer emphasized that the arts merely reflect the fabric of the society.  In the 40's we had movies with character, movies that lauded heroism and highlighted the destructive nature of moral laxity.  Now, amoral abandon is the stuff of comedy TV.  Macabre dismemberment and maximal brutality equate to horror or suspense.  Drama today guarantees you'll get full-frontal and fouler language than was heard throughout the battle of Bastogne.  Why?  You and I ask for it.

The acceptance of homosexuality as a normal lifestyle and the disintegration of marriage as a fundamental building block of society merely reflects the moral rot within our own souls.

Should government step in and curb the culture?  No.  They shouldn't have to.  Our government reflects the people and our culture reflects the people.  Motion picture ratings?  What an absurd thought in the 40's.  Today you have parents dragging their tots to see Saw VI or letting their kids download audio-porn for the iPod. Can you imagine the Parker Brothers wondering what rating they would give to Monopoly?  You see the problem?  Personal responsibility among directors.  Personal responsibility among actors and musicians.  Personal responsibily from producers.  Personal responsibility by those buying tickets or DVDs or downloading tunes.  If that well fails to produce, they will eventually stop trying to produce such vileness.

Did our entertainment become so grotesque in a decade?  No.  It won't change in a fortnight, either.  If we want change, it starts with you and me. So what are you going to see or rent or download from iTunes?

Education.  The schools stink.  Sorry, but math, physics, chemistry, literature, grammar, etc. haven't changed a lot since I was a kid.  What's changed?  Our schools and our kids.  Let's start with the latter.  Because we have not disciplined a generation, because we refuse to fail children for poor performance, we've raised a generation with no fear of consequence.  Is it any wonder employers ache to find dedicated workers?  Why is that?  Parents.  Parents have failed to instill discipline within their children.  A child won't self-discipline until he's taught the consequence to ill-discipline as a young child.  If the parents did their job, the teachers wouldn't have a tenth of the problem they have in schools.

What about the schools?  They reflect the insane worldview of higher education than the worldview of the parents sending their kids to the schools.  While universities have rejected right and wrong, the average home still sees thing as pretty black and white.  While PhDs across the land see no difference between cultures equating canibalistic cultures with ancient Greece, Joe and Jan American bleed red, white, and blue.  They tear up during "Proud to be an American" while the Fourth of July fireworks light up the night. 

Whose fault is the deterioration of academia?  Yeah, that's you and me, too.  We let that happen.  If we want our communities to have public schools, then it should be a community decision.  Not a county or a state decision.  Certainly NOT a federal issue.  Mine is the responsibility to make sure my kids know how to add and subtract.  It's not yours.  How I choose to educate my children is my business, not yours.  That's the risk and the beauty of freedom.

I guess that's all I have for now.  I expect no applause.  The more we rely upon our government to solve our problems, the faster we slide into irrelevance as a nation both within and without.  Is it too late?  I hope not. 

But it's got to start in the mirror.