Transmitting values

Hmm. I am apparently compelled to add:

In my parent's day, in general among their community, the debilitating habits were just plain old sex and alcohol. Call it Hefner Syndrome. They were the "swinging sixties" well before their kids were smoking banana peels and listening to degenerate acid folk-rock. Hefner Syndrome was Destroyer of marriages, Ruiner of families, and no respecter of political party or socioeconomic level.

If the next generation thought they could do better with throwing it all out and starting over from scratch — throwing out the baby of society's hard-earned institutions of marriage and community with the bathwater of hypocritical self-indulgent hedonism — it's at least partly because the teachers did not themselves have sufficient living respect or regard for those values they were supposed to convey.

But of course, predictably, the next gen proceeded to replicate that very hypocritical self-indulgent hedonism in their own free love and anything goes indulgences.

If some of us had to re-learn that respect for those Lost Values, from scratch, the hard-knocks way (with the help of a little shove from Above), well, then, as they say, the VW earned is appreciated more than the Caddy given as a gift.

The outworking socially is political and governmental, but the roots are always social and spiritual.

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climbing off soapbox, reaching for oxygen mask