"Do you realise what our culture has become?"

I certainly do.

I was born in the Fifties, which generally means I was a product of the Sixties. But I got my cultural education from TV reruns, which I watched avidly as late as the Seventies. That means I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet, Burns and Allen, Mr. Ed, Green Acres, Leave it to Beaver, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, My Favorite Martian, December Bride, Roy Rogers, Sugarfoot, Maverick, Bat Masterson, Have Gun Will Travel, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Fury, Lassie, Captain Kangaroo, Romper Room, Dragnet, the Untouchables, Perry Mason, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

People said witty things in comedies back then. Today they just say stupid or insulting things. And they say them often. Fathers really did know best and no one portrayed them as idiots. Except for Ozzie, who was somewhat of a bumbler.

Neighbors helped one another. Husbands and wives respected each other and they didn't think cheating was a really hawt idea. Most children respected their parents and mostly did what they were told. There was no cultural push to try to get away with as much as you could. Families ate together. Stay-at-home moms had a job: take care of my family, raise my kids to be good people, make my husband happy. Husbands tried to be good fathers, make their wives happy, and hold honest work to support the family.

Children played in the front yard without the terror that at any moment a total stranger would drive up, drag them into the car, and take them off to torture and death. They knew that if they broke a window with the baseball, they would have to pay for it. Come evenings, America sat in their living rooms in peace and security and didn't take cover when a car backfired. You could go for a walk without the terror of being mugged.

People followed the rules of good behavior. Most people donated time to their church or the Boy Scouts and besides being the right thing to do, it was honored as a good thing.

Then along came my generation. Baby Boomers. Smarter than any other collection of human beings that had ever existed in the history of the universe. Comprehending great profundities and thinking deep thoughts like no philosophers had ever thought before. They hit the colleges in 1964, full of their own importance and, like a plague of locusts, ready to destroy anything in their path. Tune in, turn on, drop out. If it feels good, do it. You can't love anyone else unless you love yourself first. Question authority. The Man is out to get you. That's so typically middle-class of you. Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Have you seen the little piggies in their starched-white shirts. Tear down the walls.

When they said "the walls" they were thinking of the walls of "the empire", the American government that was oppressing them and limiting their freedoms so awfully. But though most of them didn't say so, they were also thinking of any rules of good conduct that hemmed them in and limited their hedonistic behavior. Make love not war. Have as many sexual partners as possible; sex has nothing to do with bonding or mating or reproduction. To hell with the consequences of your actions, there is no tomorrow because *whimper* we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust.

One of the favorite adages of the age was, "There is no such thing as truth." Every fact was now to be called an opinion. What's true for you isn't true for me.

"What if you lived before Columbus, when you'd be burnt at the stake for believing anything but 'the world is flat'. Were you wrong when you said the world was round? Should you be burnt at the stake for saying it?"

"You think it's wrong to steal from JCPenney, but I think it's just fine because they're oppressing me and you and especially black people because they exploit us for our money and take what we have and they don't give anything back." And what's good for you isn't what's good for me.

We destroyed the idea of American society. First we denied there was such a thing, then we labeled it evil. We did away with the rules of decent behavior and with the notion that any individual owed anything to anyone else. Everyone should look after Number One always. Unless that individual owned a company, of course. And in a society where there was now no such thing as good and evil, there were many, many things we labeled "evil", because all our banning of judgements and standards only meant that conservatives weren't allowed to judge while we liberals would re-label the entire world. What was bad in the past is now good. What was good became first ridiculous, then contemptible, and is now evil. Part of a lengthy but obvious process of ruining society.

I don't think the kids who played a part in this had a clue what they were doing. They just thought they were being more clever than anyone before them had been. They were of course the first generation ever to question the existence of Jesus, ever to doubt that racism was a good thing, ever to challenge the rules of the society around them, ever to think about the meaning of life, ever to wonder what was the purpose of life, the first generation ever to understand the profundity of Catcher in the Rye, the first generation ever to understand how to enjoy life, ever to eat healthy foods, ever to think there was deep meaning to existence.

This also meant that their thoughts and judgements were not to be challenged. The rules of logic and reason did not apply; only the relativism of sentiment was to be used. And of course, since their sentiment was nobler than your sentiment, that meant you were wrong from the outset, before you even offered your challenge. But notice all the language I'm using--better, worse, judgement, noble, evil. These are the same distinctions our Sixties liberals were in the habit of making, and 90% of them have yet to realize the problem with their language.

"Thou shalt not make judgements" is in itself a judgement that judgement-making is bad, that the speaker has the right to make such a rule and expects you to agree to behave by it, that there is in fact such a thing as a right, and that this right has been established by the speaker, and that there is also such a thing as good and bad. The speaker is in a twenty-car pile-up and should bail out of thise mess, but has never ever seen the contradiction.

Try this on a Sixties liberal. He says, "There is no such thing as truth." You immediately respond with, "Is that true?"

Silence in the room for a second. He cannot say "yes, it's true" because he would be making your point. He is left with "it is not true" but he doesn't LIKE that sentence so he dodges into another universe. Either it's true for me and not for you or it doesn't mean anything in this universe or maybe since all assertions are only opinions then it's okay for one opiner to believe it and no one else is forced to and blah blah. Quite simply, in anyone's thinking, if they're practiced at thinking clearly, the sentence refutes itself and must be abandoned because you can't live by a self-referentially incoherent law.

I remember once when I was listening to Stand To Reason (str.org), which I strongly recommend to everyone who has a computer as it is broadcast over the internet (and over the radio if you're anywhere near Catalina, CA) Sunday afternoons. Greg Koukl, the host and one of the best-spoken clear thinkers in the U.S., took a call from a woman listener whom I'll call Donna. Donna opened with, "You shouldn't make judgements." Koukl came back with, "So making judgements is wrong?" Poor Donna, she should have curled up into a ball right there, apologizing profusely to Koukl, and dumped her stupid philosophy. She didn't. She couldn't, in fact, because she had lived by this stupidity for thirty years. "Of course," she replied, and went on to tell us how bad judgemental people were making the world. Koukl waited for her to take a breath, and then asked, "So why are you judging me?" Donna now did what all these fuzzy thinkers do, she replied according not to what she thought but by what feeling made her feel good. "I'm not judging you." There it was! Good people don't judge, therefore Donna wasn't judging! Koukl went on to explain how she had made some standards, lined him up against those standards, and decided that he had failed.

But believing something that is self-referentially incoherent poses no problems for liberals.