I recall many years ago, as we began to see more and more unwanted behavior from American children, people began to make the following statement in one form or another ...
"This isn't Leave it to Beaver, this is the real world."
The implication being that the thought that we could have a community in which children are polite and well behaved is fantasy. I have never accepted this position. America used to be a nation in which we did hard things. On September 12, 1962, in a speech at Rice University, President Kennedy said ...
"... we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
Sadly though, we are now different in America. For example, we are all painfully aware of the catastrophic effects of drug use and traffic in the U.S., and yet, the reaction of far too many Americans is "Lets just make it legal". American youth begins to run amok and our reaction is "Well this isn't Leave it to Beaver". We have become a nation that simply caves in and gives up when things become difficult. Perhaps the problem has deeper roots. Perhaps it is a question of our own self interests colliding with "the greater good". Many of us have taken economics classes, we understand the laws of supply and demand. We know that, no matter how many drug dealers our law enforcement officials arrest or otherwise neutralize, if there is fast or easy money to be made, more will fill the voids like roaches on a filthy counter. The laws of supply and demand tell us that the drug problem can be eradicated most effectively by instituting a mandatory 12 to 15 year prison sentence for the USE of narcotics. We know that if the demand is eliminated by imprisoning users and providing effective incentives for people not to begin using drugs ... the problem would go away. But this would begin to interfere with the people who want to do their drugs in private while paying lip service to stopping drug dealers in public.
Similarly, raising respectful, well-mannered children is difficult. There are some single parents who may have managed to do it. But much like removing certain car parts, it is simply a two-person task. This reality is often in conflict with the desires of people who as married couples, cannot bring themselves to behave like adults and accept the fact that, besides their spouse, they also made a commitment to their future children when they married. When faced with the choice between satisfying their own desires for 24/7 happiness (which isn't possible) and providing a safe and effective environment for their children to flourish and grow up as respectful and responsible members of society, they choose to put their own happiness first. They divorce indiscriminately and repeat the same mantra that they have for years "Children are resilient, they'll be fine." They utilize a "Justice System" that claims to seek the best interest of the children while continuing to churn out rivers of poorly educated, disrespectful, drug or alcohol addicted, and prematurely impregnated children. The statistics are all there for anyone who chooses not to ignore them.
This brings me to the main purpose of this rambling. I would like to brainstorm and determine what things need to be changed in order to produce a better society? I'd like to ask if we can create communities in which children achieve highly in school, are respectful and develop good moral foundations. We certainly seem able to create communities where the opposite is the case. We seem able to do that with little or no effort. These places are not just city slums. There are equal numbers of rural pockets of hopelessness and despair. So this is our task ... we must ask ourselves "How do we make this better." How do we make our American reality more closely resemble the town of Mayfield where June & Ward Cleaver raised Wally and Theodore Cleaver?
