At least he believes in something!

Yeah, so what? The Nazi Youth Corps also "believed in something."

Until recently I attended the most liberal and wealthy church on the West Side of Los Angeles. Almost all of the parents were college educated, white collar, newspaper-reading, politically active Christians. Some are liberal, some conservative, and very few could be considered middle of the road. Most mothers are working professionals.

Their children go to school in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, or one of the extremely expensive but very elite private schools such as Harvard-Westlake, Dye, or Mirman School for the Highly Gifted.

And I have to tell you, I have run into this kind of attitude for years. It is a product of the Sixties where we destroyed society's ability to tell anyone what was good and what was bad. We started leaving it up to the individual but the immediate result of this nihilism was for the youth of the culture to declare there wasn't anything worth believing in. Then they grew up and learned better, but still felt themselves unable to teach their own children the difference between good and bad. Instead they figured they had to allow their children to "make up their own minds" about issues.

Sadly this attitude is almost as prevalent with conservative parents as with liberals. "I don't have the right to impose my values (they mean "morals") on my kids, they should discover a values system that is all their own." Thus they're delighted when junior stumbles on some issue worth caring about. The problem is that the school did the imposing for them, and shoved cigarette intolerance and global warming onto the kid as the two most important issues confronting him.