People don't like to talk about America's culture for the same reason that a man who just had a heart attack doesn't want to discuss the double bacon cheeseburger he's eating. He knows what he's doing is killing him, but it's easier not to deal with it. We’re in the same boat.
* We treat success as an accident or a cheat while defending people who make bad decisions, who won't educate themselves or who won't work.
* We've allowed pornography to become so accessible that it's practically universally viewed, even among teenagers.
* We love victims so much that people actually fake hate crimes to claim victim status.
* We celebrate losers and deviants by giving them their own reality shows. Meanwhile, Hollywood regularly portrays businessmen, Christians and soldiers as the worst people on earth.
* More children have died because of Roe v. Wade than were killed during the Holocaust.
* Marriage is falling apart and we’re encouraging that by pushing gay marriage.
* Our universities reward Communists, terrorists and blatant anti-American sentiment with professorships. Those are the last people who should be teaching impressionable young Americans.
* There's a whole grievance industry full of people who make a living claiming to be "offended" by things.
* Religion and morality are denigrated while nihilism and immorality are considered cool.
* Legalism has superseded morality and what's "right" and "wrong" has become secondary to what's "legal" and "illegal."
* We're the greatest, most powerful, most prosperous and most virtuous nation that has ever existed and despite all of that, we obsess over our nations faults instead of our achievements.
* Americans across the spectrum are being encouraged to separate themselves off from the larger culture and nurse grievances that barely would have been given a thought a few decades ago.
Yet, we're told that we shouldn't worry about any of these things because people have always worried about our culture and things have turned out just fine. Even if that's so, have you ever considered the possibility that worrying about the culture and taking steps to keep it from getting out of hand is exactly what once kept it from going to the dogs?
Yes, there was a time when people worried about Elvis provocatively shaking his hips on stage and it's easy to laugh at that, but wouldn't we be better off if that was one of the biggest moral problems we faced as a society today? We don't like to admit the ugly truth; we’re more educated and much less racist than we used to be as a society, but we are also morally inferior to Americans from fifty years ago in almost every other way that matters.
Many people believe Rome fell because of a decline in morals while the Soviet Union disintegrated because it spent so much money trying to keep up with Reagan that it went broke. Well, we have both problems going on simultaneously. Meanwhile, preppers have become legion. Billions of dollars are being held back from the economy because people are saving up in case there's an economic collapse. Businesses are sitting on mountains of cash and looking to move their headquarters overseas. Many educated, informed people believe America is headed towards bankruptcy or runaway inflation not in fifty years, but within the next decade or two. If you're looking for signs that this country is in deep trouble, there are red flags galore waving in your face.
But this isn't just an economic problem, a spending problem or a leadership problem -- although those are all concerns. It's a cultural problem with our morals and what we value as a society on the most fundamental levels.
* In practice, our society focuses almost exclusively on the short term without thinking about the long-term consequences of our actions.
* We have a higher moral standard for the NFL than we do for our own leaders in Washington.
* We have a political party dedicated to the idea taking things from people who've worked for it and giving it to people who haven't.
* We make little effort to assimilate immigrants into our society and instead, encourage them to embrace the culture they fled for the United States.
* We've stopped acting as if we have to pay back the money we borrow.
* We treat the rule of law as optional, depending on who's impacted by it.
* We believe our children can grow up in a moral sewer and still turn out to be fine, upstanding citizens regardless.
We've become so divided, so antagonistic, so morally separated that for the first time in over a century there are people asking hard questions how much we really have in common with other Americans. If you're comparing let's say a conservative from South Carolina to a liberal from California, the honest answer is "not much that matters." Perhaps not even enough to hold a country together over the long haul if one group or the other ever became politically dominant.
There's only one way to change that and it's to address the real sickness at the heart of American culture. That sickness is our newfound reluctance to address the moral health of our society. Over the long haul, we can't thrive and we may not even be able to survive as a divided, degenerate society full of people who reward failure, resent success and live for the moment. Morality matters and if we forget that, our nation is doomed to descend into decadence, decay and perhaps one day, even dissolution.
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