Whatever Happened to Personal Responsibility?

I was facebooking the other day and for some reason or other (it doesn't have to be much of a reason on Facebook) the topic of progress came up. Some people were of the opinion that we had progressed a lot in the past, oh forty years or so.

I grew up in the 1950s and I shared that in my experience we had mostly gone backwards. What I meant of course was that fear seems to dominate us far more than it did then, despite all the retrospectives about hiding under desks because we might be nuked. But we lived in a much wider world. We also weren't so propagandized by TV all the time. There were no police in the schools. Teenage pregnancy was not an epidemic. Of course it happened now and then, but in the absence of sex-ed and stimulating videos and the expectation communicated by adults that you were going to do it anyway so exercise safe-sex, here's a condom, here's a dozen. Well in our day the condoms were not on display and you couldn't buy one if you knew they existed if you were a high-school student. Mostly our idea of sex was getting kissed or maybe dancing closely. Is the new liberation liberating? I don't think so. We've stolen much of the magic out of growing up and we've even stolen the magic out of being grown up.

We also had rifle teams in the schools. One of my girlfriends was pretty funny looking lugging around her .22 rifle, one of those ones with the big heavy barrel for target shooting. Nowadays you get sent to the principal and expelled if you have a plastic key ring ornament that's a pistol. Then of course there are knives. We all had knives. A boy scout knife was standard issue for any teenage boy. We played mumbly-peg and whittled and opened things. Some of us had those fancy Swiss army knives with all kinds of special tools. Today you get suspended for having one of those things in your pocket. Did I mention fire crackers and cherry bombs? They were great fun.

My point is that we've not only not advanced, we've retrogressed markedly into a realm of mindless fear. I'm not sure why. I know I don't like it. It's borderline crazy. I could go on with discussions of leaf-burning for example. Everyone burned their leaves along the road. It was actually kind of nice. I always loved the smell of burning leaves in the Fall. My dad used to burn all the family trash in a little stainless steel burner out in the backyard. I might add for those who can hardly believe it, that we didn't live in the country. We lived in the suburbs and pretty much everyone did it. The leaf burning -- it was in Falls Church, Virginia in a ritzy neighborhood populated by high-end government workers and military officers.

So when I hear about all the progress we've made, I know it isn't social progress. Somebody is confusing having an ipod with progress. Technology marches on as we become more and more slavish to it and to the rantings of the media and the politicians.

Freedom isn't free.