Let’s face it; America has a lot of problems: problems with our economy, our foreign policy, our schools, our government and especially with our culture. But one of our biggest problems and maybe one that is the father of the rest is that too many of our citizens are in a state of suspended adolescence. The messages abound from all directions: Why get married and tie yourself down? Party on! No need for a job when you can live at home and stay on your parents’ healthcare plan. Religion? Really?
Yes, nearly all facets of modern culture encourage young people to revel in the joyful irresponsibility of childhood and to stay that way forever. As a matter of fact, this has gone on for the last few generations, beginning of course with the 1960s, when we were admonished never to trust anyone over 30. Fast forward a few years and we come to TV shows where Dad is a hopelessly clueless couch potato and to those awful commercials where Mom is bragging about losing so much weight that she can now fit into her string bikini. Is this the way we want our kids to see their parents: Dad as an overgrown sluggard addicted to video games and Mom as a perpetual sex kitten?
But there is hope for this country because, when nature is allowed to take its logical course — and no longer affected by the happily fading influence of the Baby Boomer generation — the older people get, the more conservative they become. And despite the childish utopian desires at work among the electorate the last few years, it’s a fact of life that despite cultural inculcation it’s hard to remain a liberal once you’ve grown up.
When you are a professional student living at home with Mommy and Daddy, it’s easy to be a liberal. You merely have to grow a beard and pontificate on the greed of the one-per centers, expertly employing the otherwise useless skills you acquired at an elite Ivy League school. But once you have to apply for your own loans, pay your own insurance, taxes and the rest, you realize that your best chance to live in security and provide for your loved ones is to support the fiscally responsible agenda of conservatives.
It’s really easy to deny your religious upbringing and march for women’s “rights” to ensure your easy access to contraception and abortion, should you ever decide to enter into relations with the beastly male gender. But it’s hard to support infanticide once you’ve actually done the deed and felt the heartbeat of your child and seen him on an ultrasound image; and it’s harder still to believe there is no God when you gaze at the face of your firstborn, filled with love and awe at this gift of perfect innocence and purity.
So it’s not easy for liberals to hold on to their own once these folks have matured. Basically the only way to keep them from the real world is to cloister them in the leftist cocoons of academia, government work, or union membership. So it is no wonder that to insulate people from reality, liberalism requires the promulgation of an ever-burgeoning federal bureaucracy where they find tenure, cradle-to-grave benefits and most of all, the constant validation of their own peculiar worldview.
But as I said, there is hope. For those of us old enough to recall the chaos of the 1960s when it seemed that the whole world was losing its mind, also remember that within a few short years of the “love” generation, we put Ronald Reagan in the White House. So it may take a generation or two, but this perpetual puberty will come to an end.
The other day I was at a softball game where a young Latino woman sitting near me was on her phone, apparently talking about bridesmaids dresses for an upcoming wedding she was to be in. At one point she said, “I can’t wear that! I’m a mom now and I don’t think I should be letting that stuff hang out!” Can voting Republican be far behind?
