Dennis Prager has written another insightful article. He titles it "The Real Reason America is a Worse Country." Excerpts follow (my emphases):
With the important exception of racial discrimination -- which was already dying a natural death when I was young -- it is difficult to come up with an important area in which America is significantly better than when I was a boy. But I can think of many in which its quality of life has deteriorated.
When I was a boy, America was a freer society than it is today. If
Americans had been told the extent and number of laws that would govern their
speech and behavior within one generation, they would have been certain that
they were being told about some dictatorship, not the Land of the Free. Today,
people at work, to cite but one example, are far less free to speak naturally.
Every word, gesture and look, even one's illustrated calendar, is now monitored
lest a fellow employee feel offended and bring charges of sexual harassment or
creating a "hostile work environment" or being racially, religiously or
ethnically insensitive, or insensitive to another's sexual orientation.
Meanwhile, all employers in California are now prohibited by law from
firing a man who has decided to cross-dress at work. And needless to say, no
fellow worker can say to that man,
"Hey, Jack, why not wear the dress at home and men's clothes to work?" An employer interviewing a prospective employee is not free to ask the most natural human questions: Are you married? Do you have a child? How old are you? Soon "How are you?" will be banned lest one discriminate on the basis of health.
When I was boy, what people did at home was not their employer's
business. Today, companies and city governments refuse to hire, and may fire,
workers no matter how competent or healthy, who smoke in their homes. Sarasota,
Fla., the latest city to invade people's private lives, would not hire Winston
Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy if they applied for a
job. When I was a boy, I ran after girls during recess, played dodgeball,
climbed monkey bars and sat on seesaws. Today, more and more schools have no
recess; have canceled dodgeball lest someone feel bad about being removed from
the game; and call the police in to interrogate, even sometimes arrest,
elementary school boys who playfully touch a girl. And monkey bars and seesaws
are largely gone, for fear of lawsuits should a child be
injured. When I was boy, I was surrounded by adult men. Today, most American boys
(and girls, of course) come into contact with no adult man all day every school
day. Their teachers and school principals are all likely to be women. And if, as
is often the case, there is no father at home (not solely because of divorce but
because "family" courts have allowed many divorced mothers to remove fathers
from their children's lives), boys almost never come into contact with the most
important group of people in a boy's life -- adult men. The contemporary absence
of men in boys' lives is not only unprecedented in American history; it is
probably unprecedented in recorded history. When I was a boy, we had in our lives adults who took pride in being
adults. To distinguish them from our peers, we called these adults "Mr.," "Mrs."
and "Miss," or by their titles, "Doctor," "Pastor," "Rabbi," "Father." It was
good for us, and we liked it. Having adults proud of their adulthood, and not
acting like they were still kids, gave us security (as well as something to look
forward to in growing up). Today, kids are surrounded by peers twice, three,
four times their age. When I was a boy, the purpose of American history textbooks was to teach
American history. Today, the purpose of most American history texts is to make
minorities and females feel good about themselves. As a result, American kids
today are deprived of the opportunity to feel good about being American (not to
mention deprived of historical truth). They are encouraged to feel pride about
all identities -- African-American, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay -- other than
American. . . When I was boy, people dressed up to go to baseball games, visit the
doctor and travel on airplanes. Today, people don't dress up even for
church. When I was a boy, Time and Newsweek were well written and relied little
on pictures and illustrations. Today, those magazines often look like adult
comic books by comparison. They are filled with large illustrations and photos,
and they dumb down the news with features like "Winners and Losers" and "Who's
Up and Who's Down." And when I was a boy, it would have been inconceivable for
Time to substitute anything, let alone a tree, for the flag planted by the
marines on Iwo Jima. One might argue that these are the same laments that every previous older
generation has expressed -- "Ah, when I was young…" But in America, that has not
been the case. In America, the older generations tended to say the opposite --
"When I was a kid, things were worse." Can we return to the America of my youth? No. Can we return to the best
values of that time? Yes. But not if both houses of Congress, the presidency and
the Supreme Court move the country even further leftward. If that happens, many
of the above noted changes will simply be accelerated: More laws restricting
"offensive" speech will be enacted; litigation will increase and trial lawyers
will gain more power; the American military will be less valued; trees will
gradually replace the flag as our most venerated symbol; schools will teach even
less as they concentrate even more on diversity, sexuality and the environment;
teenage sex will be increasingly accepted; American identity will continue to be
replaced by ethnic, racial, gender or "world citizen" identity; and the power of
the state will expand further as the power of the individual inevitably
contracts. It's hard to believe most Americans really want that.