Optimus Template

America Adrift: The Crisis of Values will present evidence that America’s present confusion about what are her values is having a negative social impact. There is a dichotomy of values perspectives in America today. We will examine its origin and impact on the rise of self-destructive behavior in America.

Our title suggests that our nation and its people have become divided on essential precepts upon which the nation was founded and from which it is to derive its fundamental identity and value.

The Culture and Media Institute conducted a recent poll on national cultural values to gauge the public’s perception of what were the values of America that made it great and were important for its future. They concluded from the poll results that “America no longer enjoys cultural consensus on God, religion and what constitutes right and wrong.”

The world of the 21st century is quite different than the world of a hundred years ago. In 1900, most people in the world, including Americans, had not travel beyond fifty miles of their homes.

The world today is indeed vastly different than that former time. The advancement of communications, travel and technology are unprecedented. How hard it would be for George Washington to conceive of a jumbo jet, text messaging or downloading a copy of the Constitution from thousands of miles away?

We live in miraculous times. Yet with all our advancement in technology, industry and science ... has it made us a good nation today? Are we more happy and less in danger because of the advancements in technology and material comfort?

In our introduction presentation we called for America to realize its ideal of “one nation under God” as a model that can be universalized to “one family under God.”

To do that, America should:
- Become a model of interfaith harmony and cooperation
- Revive America’s founding spirit and virtue, and universalize the American Dream in the context of God’s Dream for all humanity.
- Demonstrate the power of “one family under God” to change the way we see each other and treat each other - thus changing the climate of conflict in our world today.

Thus, as was mentioned in the last presentation, we need a new level of patriotism; a deeper definition of “love of country.” to answer this new call. We need to renew our understanding and commitment of the unique founding principles of America. A new patriotism also means that we must be willing to rise to a deeper honesty about the shortcomings of America ... not in the spirit of the “blame America first” crowd, but out of a deeper faith in America; that if we can face our problems squarely we can surely rise above them and, finally, bring into substance the ideal and vision for which America was founded. America needs “tough love.” They say that the first step on the long road of recovery is to admit that we have a problem.

Whereas, we see the signs of advancement of our civilization, we also see the signs of stress and decline. Let’s consider one snapshot, a sample that may illustrate this downward trend. A 1940 CBS poll of teachers showed that the top discipline problems in schools at that time were: students chewing gum in class - noise in class - dress code - littering - running in the hall.

A National Education Association Teacher’s Poll was administered in the mid 1950’s at a time when there was a heightened concern about the apparent rise of teen unrest and delinquency. At that time, the teachers who took the poll felt that 95% of their students were “well behaved.”
This same CBS poll administered in 1980 gives us a far more disturbing view and one that indicates the existence of a decades long trend of decline of standards and behavior. The top discipline problems in 1980 were: DRUGS - ALCOHOL - PREGNANCY - SUICIDE - RAPE AND ROBBERY. Today, problems in High Schools and Colleges have been exploding. We hear of events almost daily, splashed across our newspapers and television screens, of a most extreme dimension.

Another leading indicator pointing toward decline is the demise of the two-parent family. It is an often recited truism “As families go ... so goes the nation.” This is not just a colloquial truth, it is an empirical reality. When the family declines, that is, when men and women can no longer maintain a bond of love and trust ... society declines; and in its wake rises an ever-increasing tide of self-destructive behavior.

In 1940 - 1950: over 80% of youth had the benefit of being raised in a two-parent family. Today, that number has declined to less than 50%. Even more ominous for our future, presently, 35.8% of all births are out of wedlock.

Uncle Sam, we love you and we deeply respect you as we always have and will. . .but we can’t be “the enabler” anymore. We can’t just hide behind the Flag and shout U-S-A!. . .We must admit. Uncle. . .you’ve got a problem and something has to change.

The following is but a brief list of some of the behaviors that take place everyday in America. America has been on a decades-long bender toward ultimate self destruction. Everyday in America:

2,054 teens (age 15-19) become pregnant – (overall 46% of teens are sexually active)
24,657 young people (age 15-24) contract a sexually transmitted infection (STI)
588 abortions among teens (age 15-19)
89 Americans commit suicide
4,493 children born out of wedlock – (35.8% of all births)
7,000 students drop out of high school
2,461 cases of child abuse reported
4,931 violent crimes committed
517 sexual assault incidents reported
7,000,000 fellow Americans are in the penal system

A 1990 commission of leaders from the fields of health, education and business gathered together specifically to study the circumstance of the health of youth in America. Their conclusions were a rather stunning and damning indictment of modernity in America. The title of their report, CODE BLUE, was so named to illustrate the urgency they felt. The report concluded with this most disturbing observation:

“... the challenges to the health and well-being of America’s youth are not primarily rooted in illness or economics. Unlike the past, the problem is not childhood disease or unsanitary slums. The most basic cause of suffering in our youth today is profoundly self-destructive behavior.”

As we mentioned before, the idiom “As families go ... so goes the nation” is not without empirical support: British historian and anthropologist J. D. Unwin had been intrigued by Sigmund Freud’s observation that the regulation of sexual desire within certain cultures was then a transformed energy toward social progress. Unwin wanted to see if this was universally true and thus conducted a study of 86 cultures that had existed over the course of 5000 years of history. He discovered that those cultures that embraced the values of abstinence before monogamous marriage and fidelity within marriage were cultures of “expansive energy.” In other words, they were cultures of endurance and stability. Indeed, he confirmed “As the family goes ... so goes the nation.”

The founder of Harvard’s department of sociology, Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin in his 1956 book, The American Sex Revolution, stunned the Bohemian-friendly American intelligencia with his indictment of the attempt to discard all sexual morays in its sexual revolution. “Voluntary suicide” is what he called it. Sorokin was referring to its impact on the family and the subsequent social chaos that it would engender. He was a prophet of sort, predicting the type of consequences the Code Blue study would document 34 years later.

Richard G. Wilkins, Professor of Law at Brigham Young University in his 2004 book “Marriage on the Brink,” states, “Without stable marriage, women suffer, men suffer – and children suffer the most. Every deviation from the ideal model of enduring monogamous marriage between a man and a woman increases the suffering of men, women and children.”

A very important study conducted by the Center for Marriage and Families for The Institute for American Values in September 2005, was able to identify some of the concrete implications of marriage and its importance toward a productive and stable society. Their study called “Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-six Conclusions from the Social Sciences” listed 26 truths, backed by empirical social science research, that indicated “Why Marriage Matters.” We will just list four of the 26 here:

1. Divorce and unmarried child bearing increase poverty for both children and mothers.
2. Parental divorce appears to increase children’s risk of school failure.
3. Marriage is associated with reduced rates of alcohol and substance abuse for both adults and teens.
4. Children whose parents divorce have higher rates of psychological distress and mental illness.

Seen in this light, the statistic shared earlier, indicating that 35.8% of all births are out of wedlock, we now can understand how that does not bode well for our society. As more young people lose the opportunity to be raised by two parents, the increase of self-destructive behavior will subsequently rise. Eventually, such behavior permeates society, eventually touching all our lives.

A poignant case in point is from a 1997 Hudson Institute study titled “Fathers, Marriage and Welfare Reform” demonstrated the social impact of one type of dysfunction family, where fathers abandon their families.

70 percent of long-term prison inmates,
60 percent of rapists,
75 percent of adolescents charged with murder, grew up without fathers!

Father-less children are: Three times more likely to fail at school, require psychiatric treatment and commit suicide as adolescents and are 40 times more likely to experience child abuse compared with children growing up in two-parent families.

Of course there are exemplary single parents who have beat the odds and achieved great success. They are to be applauded. Society should be made aware of the tremendous uphill battle that single parents face. It is in all our interests that we feel all children are OUR children.

Our society is somewhat like the proverbial frog in the saucepan. If you attempt to toss the poor frog directly into the boiling pot, he will surely hop-out straight away. However, if you stealthily place him in tepid water and incrementally increase the heat, he will not sense the gradual change and remain at ease even until a fork can be poked into his well-cooked flesh.

America is like that. We have been on a decades long process of incrementally re-engineering the values that served as the guiding perspectives of life. Increment by increment we have been edging away from the founding ideals and have replaced them with the perspective of a secular, selfish individualism. Could that be frog I smell?

They say that ideas have consequences, but it is also true that consequences have ideas. In other words, there are discernable reasons why one chooses good behavior or destructive behavior. It is an issue of character. A person of good character generally chooses good behavior. They have “good” character because they have been exposed to the ideas of good values that were modeled in their life at home and, typically, at church. They are trained to not be self-absorbed, to instead think of others and find happiness and fulfillment within the context of the greater whole.

Conversely, those prone to destructive self-absorbed behavior are usually underdeveloped in the quality of their character. They have never been properly exposed to good models. Typically they are exposed to destructive models in the home. As the family goes ... So goes the society.