Dear Chris:
You make excellent points. I would like to add a few to buttress your position.
CULTURE
Culture is not merely the collective body of tastes in the arts, but is also the reflection of manners generally accepted as the identity of a group of people, how they go about living their lives, raising their families, and the goals to which they aspire as a society.
From World War II up to about 1970, we had a culture in this county that was much more homogenous than it has been over the last nearly 50 years, or was for about 300 years before the Second World War. This “cultural diversity” stemmed from several factors.
Historian David Hackett Fischer traced the origins of four distinct waves of English immigrants to this country, each with its own unique characteristics. Fischer described their story and cultures as “the origins and stability of a social system which for three centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws and individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture."
These distinct cultural groups gave rise to the divisions persisting in American white society today: the New Englanders/Yankees (Puritans) coming from East Anglia; the Cavaliers and indentured servants went to Virginia (and their gentry created the Southern states’ plantation culture); the Quakers went to the Midatlantic and the Midwest; and the Irish-Scottish and borderlands people (near the border with Scotland) who went to the West and to the South, and whose ranching and agriculture traditions overlapped.
These folks stubbornly held on to their family and clan traditions literally from the mid-1600s to about 1945. Only in the crucible of World War II was there a significant coalescence into an “American” identity, when unity was absolutely necessary if American military personnel were to have a chance against their enemies. This cultural overlap lasted up until the late 1960s, but things changed during the 1960s, and disrupted and eventually destroyed our homogeneity.
We know that the 1960s was a time of massive social transformation. The anti-war, Civil Rights, and Women’s Rights movements were huge factors, forcing people outside of those groups to look at their calls for being treated with dignity and respect, legal equality, and with a place at society’s table. The hippies’ life-styles and some of the radical political groups, along with religious groups, espoused “do your own thing” philosophies. Many authors and “self-help” gurus crawled out of the woodwork and started entire self-help industries, which continue to this day.
The net result was a society in which the libertarian philosophy of “do your own thing” was restored to the height of personal ethics for many people.
Demographics in particular have shifted from 1970 to the present. Blacks and Asians have not increased their percentage of our country’s population by any appreciable degree, but the Latinos have definitely assumed a major increase in population, and with them added to the black and Asian populations, they will be a minority majority by 2045, according to the U.S. Dept. of the Census.
STANDARDS
Regardless of ethnicity or race, I believe it is vitally important for Americans to forge an identity as one people, with a focus on doing the right thing rather than “do your own thing.” This involves a commitment to political democracy; economic justice; and a strong belief in supporting the Bill of Rights.
None of this has anything to do with race, ethnicity, gender, or country of origin. But these are matters that need to be taught in homes from early childhood so that they become engrained in people as soon as possible and so that we can once again learn what it’s like to be “Americans” without the hyphenated prefix in front of that word.
TATTOOS, PIERCINGS, STRANGE HAIRCUTS
Many kids think that tattoos, piercings, unusual haircuts and hair-dying are good ways to distinguish themselves and “make a mark.” Many teenagers are trying to separate themselves from their parents and think that a tattoo (or group of tattoos) will help accomplish that. They often don’t think about possible health risks; how they will think about the tattoo in five, 10, 30 years; and the very real danger of employers stereotyping them for having tattoos.
Parents need to start the conversation with their kids early—maybe around eight, nine or 10—about making themselves “stand out” by developing their own identity. How do they do that? Not by what they look like, but by their actions, their choices, the decisions they make. Those are the lasting reflections of who they are—and they don’t have the negative consequences of having to get rid of a tattoo or piercing that they may later regret having gotten.
THE ADDICTIVE CELLPHONE
Another problem area is in the addictive use of cellphones. In so many parts of society—walking down the street, being in a restaurant, waiting in line, we are so alone, so isolated, by the very device that is supposed to connect us with other people. Again, parents need to get kids focused on conversation, face to face, and interacting with one another in person.
RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY
Among the most important cultural traits we need to reinstate is internalized, active respect for authority. This means parents have to learn how to be parents. Don’t let your kids call you by your first name. There has to be a hierarchy within the family, the first social unit the child with which the child interacts. Society is made up of people; people are primates; and we have millions of years of primate evolution which made us live in hierarchies in order to survive. We cannot just blithely ignore that reality.
Much of today’s anti-authoritarianism comes from two sources from the 1960s, and one source from today.
During the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-War movement both caused people to seriously challenge the authoritarian diktats of older, white Establishment males, who tried to enforce Jim Crow-era racist laws and traditions, on the one hand, and the orders to fight in the Vietnam War, on the other. Progressives felt that it was time for a change in social morés and laws as to race and that we needed to get out of a war that was causing such cleavage in American society. The numbers of young people who died in Vietnam came to over 58,000 but the damage to our respect for authority has lasted to this day and has impacted a huge part of our culture.
Stemming from the anti-anti-war crowd (mostly Appalachians and their descendants in the country-western sphere of society), which had a long history of distrust of authority and government, there has been a current (i.e., within the last 25 years) orientation to chest-beating “do your own thing” from the right wing. This attitude has filtered down to kids over the last generation or so, and it is this spirit which has triggered a whole new appearance of “scene kids,” those with a panoply of tattoos, piercings, and weird hair colors, along with an amalgam of “emo” and Gothic attire.
They send a message of emotionally-damaged young people with serious self-image problems.
You might say, “But what about the hippies with their weird hairstyles and bell-bottoms?” I would say that those things can be changed, and there was no permanent alteration to one’s appearance or personality. With tattoos, piercings, and earlobe plugs, however, these changes are permanent and appear to reflect patterns of self-loathing.
When I was in high school, one of my favorite teachers taught AP History. He was a repository of wise sayings. One of his best was:
“Everyone is free to swing his fist, but the freedom to do that ends precisely at the point where my nose begins.”
If I don’t like something I read or hear on the radio or TV, I can read something else, or switch (or turn off) the channel. In today’s society, however, youngsters have not been taught that there are social consequences to their behaviors, so in public I am forced to look at people with freak-show physical appearances (tattoos, piercings, bizarre hair colorings) and/or hear their bump-a-thump-a “boom-box” music coming out of cars and/or boom-boxes on the sidewalks or the subway or areas of the mall where I might want to shop.
This is not the case of an elderly “geezer” yelling out: “Hey! You kids! Get off my lawn!!”
This is the case of millions of people being forced to watch and/or hear degenerate images and/or music when we don’t choose to see and/or hear it on our own. In short, why should I be forced to watch people with disgusting appearances, who lack the social respect to restrain themselves in public?
You might argue and say: “Well, this is just part of the ongoing ‘culture war’ that’s afflicted our society for many years. Get over it.” I, in turn, would say: “Who gives these people the moral right to force me, and countless others, to watch the parade of ‘uglies’ and be compelled to listen to so-called ‘music’ that I don’t like? Why am I, and countless others, required to be their audience?”
The real problem is the lack of standards, where people are taught that what they say and do have social consequences and that they need to subordinate their own self-absorbed impulses to the greater good, so that people feel that they are members of and belong to their society.
The need for standards is clear. If we do not have an identity to which we can claim allegiance, to a group to which we belong and which wants us, then there will be a sense of dissociation, of loneliness, of isolation, and, ultimately, of despair. Is that the legacy we want for ourselves or to leave our children? I don’t think so.
Conversely, we must also understand that the individual’s rights and talents must also be respected and enhanced. But, as Aristotle so wisely said in "POLITICS," “…Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.”
