I got laid the other day. Before anybody gets the idea this is going to be porn—don’t; I’ll get the real point of this peroration in a minute. When someone my age and physical appearance gets lucky, the usual result is yippee!! More likely YIPPEE!!!! But after a bit of thinking, the yippee factor faded, and reality set in. She is younger than I, with a great personality, a good mind, and at least a partial education, but when we finished, she got up from the bed, told me to keep her bra and panties as souvenirs, and left. Suddenly, I realized that this was a one night stand. I have known her for several years, and we seemed simpatico. I thought that there was the possibility of a relationship that could go somewhere.

Then, as I said, I began thinking about more than myself and took a good look at society in general. I began to question what in the world has happened to American society. The question that crossed my mind as most urgent concerned the ideas of commitment and honesty and loyalty and honor and respect. Society nowadays seems more concerned with making money and “hooking up” for the moment than in people being genuinely interested in and looking out for each other and concerned with the future. Getting to know someone in a rather detailed and deep manner is a lost art. Being honest with others about feelings and thoughts and outlooks is considered a faux pas, merely pathetic self-indulgence. Behaving honorably is definitely out of fashion—people don’t stand for any principles anymore; in fact, they don’t appear to have principles at all. As far as respect goes, it’s hard to respect oneself, let alone others, if there are no standards by which to measure self-conduct and the conduct of others. I asked myself again, “What happened?”

Perhaps, the reasons for my dilemma are buried in the 1960s. Then, the worst generation, as I call them, my generation, began the “if it feels good, do it” mantra and left something behind. When we “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out”, we lost something good, something that made people whole, something that was more than a worn out moral code—freedom and its attendant glories, including the right to choose what is good and right for oneself without constraint from the outside, except for a personal moral code developed over time under the auspices of Western Philosophy. I’m not trying to be preachy here, but in the rush to be different and “hip”, my generation has missed out on many things that make life worthwhile. I also don’t want to be a fuddy-duddy or genuinely more lame than I already am, but this experience has taught me that life is not a zero-sum game. There is a huge difference between being alone and being lonely, and most of the people in this culture seem to be lonely in the most negative sense, because the loneliness is essentially mandated by the pressure for conformity. These people are trying to deal with loneliness by substituting sex and money for genuine emotional bonding and fulfilling relationships. As a result, they are genuinely and perpetually disappointed and become cynical, if not hate-filled, toward their fellow men and women, and themselves. Thus, they become easy targets for the even more depraved in our society—the political class, which exploits their negative personal feelings, which the political class helped to create, by creating senses of victimhood and dislocation. If we think of Huxley’s Brave New World, we remember that sex and drugs were the primary means of controlling all levels of society, especially the middle and lower classes. There’s no telling what would have happened if they had had rock ‘n’ roll. When brother bill was impeached, the prime defense was that it was all about sex and that a small prevarication about sex was no big deal. That distracted the poorly educated, poorly educated by design, masses and derailed the truth: perjury is perjury, regardless of the reason. In sum, the political class uses the negative outlook on life that it created as a political weapon to be dragged in as an election issue, and then ignored, until the next election. Meanwhile, victimhood, dislocation, distraction, and conformity are stringently enforced, and freedom is chipped away into nothingness, and people are left alone, even in the presence of others. Loneliness has become, perforce, a state of mind unrelieved even by the temporary companionship of another.

Perhaps, another piece of the puzzle that may help to answer my question of what happened to American society is education. What is being passed off as education in our schools today is a load of misinformation, revisionism, omission, bigotry, and falsehood. No attempt is made in public schools, or in many colleges and universities for that matter, to install a usable knowledge base founded on the western Canon or critical thinking, reading, or writing skills. One might ask how I can say this: thirty years’ experience in junior college teaching of English language and literature, with some senior college experience, has shown me how inadequate high schools are in this country. At the beginning of every semester in every course I teach, I test all my students on their basic history knowledge, a little geography, some ethical problems, and general knowledge, trying to make the point that one cannot write from a vacuum—we need a knowledge base to even begin to write critically, or at all.  Subjects range from when things happened (World War 2, for instance) to general knowledge (who is speaker of the house). As the years have passed, students know fewer and fewer answers, to the point that they get maybe one out of twenty-one correct. Even the ones who have taken a course in history don’t get the history questions correct. Many do get 7 December 1941 correct, because of that dreadful movie with some guy named Affleck in it. By the time that movie ended, I was actually thinking of rooting for the Japanese to put the moviegoers out of their misery, but I digress. The education system in this country has been hijacked by people who want to destroy the history and knowledge base of the country and replace everything with a politically correct, principle-free, political education camp system that espouses their warped and unrealistic idealism. These people are not humanists or involved in any philosophical system of the Western or Eastern Worlds. They are dead-enders from the perverse idealism of the 1960s who do not/cannot understand that their time has passed and that people generally don’t believe in or trust them anymore, if they ever did. After all, they are all over thirty. All one has to do is listen to “Imagine” or “Blowing in the Wind” to understand the incredible naiveté and perversity of the 1960s idealism.

Most seriously, they have hijacked the political system, demanding ever higher taxes, ever greater controls over the people, and ever increasing attempts at silencing their critics. These self-elected “elites” that constitute the political system cannot abide disagreement; all who are not them must be silenced. The problem, therefore, becomes more acute than just solving the problem of why one night stands are so prevalent in a culture that, heretofore, prided itself on its moral stance, even though it wasn’t always entirely consistent. Morality of any sort imposes standards on its adherents, and the 1960s generation abhors standards more than anything else. They listened to those who said that they were the best educated generation in history, and promptly stopped learning. As a result of their ensuing ignorance, they rejected that which they did not understand, which was everything. Like the old cliché says, “they had all the answers, but they didn’t understand or even know the questions.” They believed in their omnipotence and gave no ground to those who had gone before and learned and seen and grown from their experiences. The 1960s generation created their own world and peopled it with themselves and no others, denigrating every facet of the Western and Eastern Worlds with their arrogant misconceptions. In the process, they became useful tools for demagogues and would-be tyrants, elevating them to hero status and worshipping them so completely that they could act with impunity, which they did (think Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, for two).

When feminism came on the scene, a basically good idea of treating women with respect, dignity, and equality was quickly debased into an opportunity to distract people from the dreams of the so-called elites and to cheapen the treatment of women rather than elevating it. Women became objects and were even more quickly propagandized into accepting their new status and fighting any concept that might change their status, good or bad. The tendency to objectify and ossify people in their status for the purpose of use as political pawns underscored the nihilistic attitudes of the 1960s generation. Women were somewhat released from the old paradigm of “barefoot and pregnant”, stay-at-home moms, but the paradigm shift of the period did little to prepare them for the vicissitudes that the shift brought about—resistance, distancing, hurt feelings, and loneliness. One of the problems brought by this paradigm shift is the forcing of women into categories and denying them the ability to identify/define themselves, in other words, a loss of freedom, though freedom was promised. Feminism demanded, like the counterculture before it, absolute fidelity, this time, to the definition of womanhood, without regard for an individual’s cares, concerns, beliefs, and attitudes; in other words, women were pigeon-holed into a limited number of roles and expectations that not all women believed in or fit in. The concepts of individual morality and liberty were completely denigrated and tossed aside as passé. There was no room, as I said, for freedom, or for a woman’s real right to choose what was best for her.

The children of the 1960s had, through concentrated effort, rejected everything in a mindless dash toward the tripartite goal of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. They forgot, didn’t know, or didn’t understand that those things cannot even begin to happen in a moral vacuum. They did not even understand what Martin Luther King, Jr., was saying, when he called for change that had to happen with a moral underpinning. They could not/would not accept that change has to have something which justifies the change in moral paradigms. They flat out could not grasp that some sort of morality is absolutely imperative in any responsible culture. Nihilism as a code for society cannot sustain the human being for any length of time. There is an inborn need for moral structure that cannot be overridden by slogans and marches.

What took the 1960s generation from “tune in, turn on, and drop out” to the almost absolute lack of standards and thence to a loss of moral cohesion was an arrogation of the self that transcended the totality of Western Culture. The ideas that gave the West its framework and filled it out—democracy, freedom, validation of the self through introspection and comparison to the powerful ideals of the West—were given short shrift in the pursuit of “if it feels good, do it”, which was morphed into a slogan for shoes of “just do it”, which became a mantra for feel-good emptiness and selfish indulgence.  Our society was the 800 pound gorilla in the room, but its heart was defective and slowly rotting as we entered a period of almost unrelieved angst without a moral code to buttress our lives and loves. Life, despite protestations to the contrary, was cheapened and became even more cheapened, with concepts such as love and commitment and honor and integrity becoming empty, archaic slogans with no resonance in the modern mind.

For many, the term “one night stand” is a good thing; it connotes a successful hunt: the quarry has been sighted, stalked, and taken. Only in this hunt, success is an empty experience, just another notch on the bedpost. Movies, such as Knocked Up, show the problems attendant on the sterility of our moral culture; though some of these movies, such as the one mentioned, work themselves into a happy ending, the real world does not usually work out so well. This lack of a set of standards and expectations leaves us sullen, unhappy, angry, and alone. We may put a smile on in public, but in the empty rooms of our minds and hearts, we know the truth—we are alone and will probably always be so.

The more the society evolves in a principle-free, standard-free direction, the more vulnerable it becomes. It becomes a target for those who share illusory or perverted, intellectually and emotionally, principles. Those in our society who resist standards as “cramping their style” are guilty of the worst treason of all—not caring whether they or their society live or die. They are embroiled in a love/hate relationship with themselves. They love the choices they have, but they hate the idea of having to take responsibility for those choices, because the consequences remind them of their alienation from themselves and the loneliness that that alienation and the loss of freedom bring.

I don’t know whether there are answers to this tragedy—the loss of a culture that has lasted for at least 5000 years; there are no easy ones, for sure. I’m not terribly sure that I understand the entire cause for this malaise, beyond the problem of the 1960s generation. Perhaps the two world wars contributed; perhaps the cold war and the threat of nuclear annihilation were involved as well. Whatever the cause, the problem is here and will remain until Western Civilization is gone, or saved.

Once the Western World was glorious, and though it had its problems, it showed itself as a beneficent light for mankind to grow under and mature. One day, the would-be tyrants will perhaps come to their senses and discard the trappings of a by-gone era that should never have come to pass. Our society and our world, the Western World, have worked tirelessly to set men free from the bonds of slavery. Hopefully, the Western World will awaken in time to save itself from enslavement at the hands of its own citizens and from utter collapse under the weight of a tyranny not seen before.

Once, we knew ourselves and where we were going. Now, we are going in a thousand directions, each studded with hate, bigotry, and searing self-loathing, altogether creating certainly not the greatest generation, nor for that matter, the worst generation—we have created the loneliest generation.

We are alone in a night of our own making, sullenly awaiting the light. Can we bear to see it?