The post-war culture is no longer dominant, Fred Reed says:
At age eight I walked every morning the perhaps six blocks to Robert E. Lee Elementary School, alone. Why not? There was nothing to be afraid of. My friends and I rode to Westover, the shopping center on Washington Boulevard, and left our bikes on the sidewalk for hours while we read comic books in the drug store. Why not? Nobody stole bikes. My family never locked the doors of the house. Why should we? There weren´t any burglars.
And in summer evenings thirty kids, girls and boys, played hide-and-seek across several blocks, and parents didn´t give it a thought. Why should they? It was safe. We were the dominant culture, the only culture, and we didn´t do pederasty, engage in gang attacks, or muggings, or drive fast on kid-littered streets. It wasn´t our way. If we had suffered a natural disaster, no one would have looted. It wasn´t what we did.
I´m not sure what would have happened if a gang of high-schoolers had robbed a candy store. It was impossible, because we didn´t do such things. A child molester? I don´t know. It would have one way or another been a case of God help him and he never would have been seen again. The culture didn´t tolerate child molesters.
And now, and now….
And now I read daily of armed police patrolling the halls of schools, of parents walking their kids to school because children aren´t safe by themselves, of metal detectors at the doors, of flash mobs of, er, teens robbing stores. Instead of homogeneity we have diversity, which means you have to buy a new bicycle twice a year. Leave on unattended for ten minutes, and it disappears.
How did we get here? Why do we put up with it? Bastardy in this white, once civilized society is now said to be at thirty percent: A middle class with a slum morality. You have to be crazy to leave your keys in an open car, which we once regularly did. There was no reason not to.
The answer of course is that the post-war culture is no longer dominant. When all of a population agree that certain things are not acceptable, such as assaults, looting, mob robberies, and thievery, they don´t happen. After those horrendous tidal waves hit Japan, there was no looting. It isn´t part of Japanese culture. After riots in America, after Katrina, there was and is massive looting. The culture no longer enforces it standards of behavior.
Speaking of Fred, I recommend his cop columns.
The riots of the 1960s are seriously understudied given that they strongly mark the era when the cultures changed and the world described here disappeared for good. I frequently talk to groups of young people who have no idea that urban riots occurred in the US in the 1960s, so I presume they’re not being taught in schools. Young people have a vague idea of the riots generally understand them as having something to do with the civil rights movement.
They were “peaceful protests,” Faze.
Faze has a good point. I lived through that era, so I well understand that the 1960s was a violent revolution, but this fact seems to have been dropped down the memory hole with regard to the current generation. Admittedly, the revo wasn’t as violent as it could have been, because the much-vaunted “Establishment” (most of whom were actually moderate liberals) curled up in the fetal position and didn’t actually fight back much. But make no mistake, the violence was there, and it was a revolution, just like the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 was an invasion, even though there wasn’t much fighting. The true history of those times has yet to be written.
Watching, Carlos the Jackal, The Baader Meinhof Complex, and The Weather Underground really brought home how far from benign the Counterculture was.
“The culture didn´t tolerate child molesters.”
Can’t let that one slide. The culture clearly did have a problem with covering up abuse.
Whereas now, we don’t cover up abuse, whether it exists or not; see the McMartin case, for starters. No one is saying that pre-1960′s culture was perfect — just better, IMHO.