A Nation in Crisis

People, the news media and pundits like to throw around the word “crisis.” The mainstream media and their ilk tell us that we are currently experiencing a crisis in the sub-prime mortgage market, an economic crisis, a crisis with the environment, a crisis in race relations and with oil prices. There is a crisis with the polar bears, the environmentalists tell us, as they taut their questionable consensus on the global warming crisis, this even as 31,000 scientists rebuke their “consensus.” Educators tell us there is a crisis in public education. We even have a steroid crisis in the sports industry. I won’t be opining about any of these “crisis” today.

---

We in the United States are experiencing a crisis of epidemic proportions. It is a crisis that threatens to end the great experiment in democracy that is our country. It is a crisis that involves apathy and arrogance, ignorance and a lack of fundamental prioritization. It is a crisis that centers on the loathsome practice of self-aggrandizement at the expense of others and that feeds on the “I’ve got mine, to hell with you” attitude possessed by the self-absorbed so prevalent in today’s American society. We the People have a crisis of purpose. The Me Generation on the 1960s and 1970s did a great deal of damage to our country. It did a great deal of damage to Western Civilization. While the counter-culture of this era promoted introspection – a good thing, it delivered to mainstream society the self-absorbed philosophy of moral relativism, in which an individual’s actions were presented relative to any extreme that would rationalize said action – a selfish and, therefore, bad thing. As the label indicates, the people caught-up in the Me Generation’s moral, cultural and sexual revolution of the time re-centered the focus of our culture from protecting our society so that it may be bequeathed to future generations to satisfying individual needs and desires, and placing the special interests of the individual above the necessary interests that nurture our uniquely American ideology. More...