Meg... ...I was responding to this at the end of the post I was commenting on: So, does anyone out there have a suggestion regarding Moby Dick here? And no, I am not flushing him down the toilet men so don't even bother. Oh. Never mind. I'm in my early 30's, so the change must have happened recently because it wasn't quite like this when I was a kid. Yeah, it kind of came about during the 90’s. I am not sure but I think it had something to do with Oprah. My friend responded by telling me that he'd drive it until it broke and make them completely rebuild it again under warranty. What the hell kind of mentality is that? The kind of mentality that says do whatever feels good, there won’t be any consequences and screw whomever has to pay for this. (Somebody does.) Can you have it automatically deducted from his paychecks? Yes, and I think that will happen when the divorce is final. The mentality that you are speaking of has permeated our society to the point that we have all forgotten what it is like to be responsible and when we discuss it, we are called names that truly offend most of us so we just sit there and don’t say a thing. It’s really a shame because we will never have another generation like Tom Brokaw discusses in The Greatest Generation. That is really a bad thing because that generation saved the world from Hitler and Nazism. The way they grew up, most of them suffering through the Depression, they had strength and ethics the likes of which we haven’t seen since. They had no welfare or entitlement programs so they had no other choice than to learn to take care of themselves. Pride stood in the way of taking hand outs. I’ve been around long enough to have seen things change and even long enough to see the backlash to some of the changes that have occurred. It’s interesting to look back and see how people have changed over the years. I remember the Viet Nam War and all of the protests that occurred then. That war has affected us far more than most people would be able to tell. There were a lot of people who thought that the war was so bad that most Americans we actually looked down upon the soldiers themselves, something we couldn’t imagine nowadays. Many people evaded the draft in one way or another and didn’t feel the least bit bad about it. A lot of them did it legally by going to college and majoring in education. That way, the schools have been full of relatively liberal teachers since that war and now those students are running most of the universities and that is why so many of them are so liberal. As those people age and retire, we will begin to see more conservative people taking care of colleges. I remember that there was only one girl in my high school that got pregnant, at least only one that everybody knew about. She didn’t tell us, we found out. But the originally story was that she had rheumatic fever. Society itself kept pregnancies from happening because we had bad words for girls who “did”. Then, when they legalized birth control in the early 60’s and abortion in the early 70’s, it wasn’t so important anymore whether or not a girl “did”. So, we had that crazy decade we so fondly remember, the 70’s. We had been an agricultural society for 5,000 years so we pretty much had to depend upon the nuclear family to survive. But as we have gone from an agricultural society to one based on industry and then technology and service, we have changed so much that the nuclear family isn’t as necessary as it once was. That, combined with birth control, abortion and the loose morals of the 70’s has changed us so quickly that we can’t stop long enough to figure out what standards are important to us anymore. Not that birth control is a bad thing, but the timing of it’s availability sucked. Less than 200 years ago, a person rarely traveled 30 miles away from his birthplace in his entire life. He pretty much knew that he was going to live and die in the same place and work the same job and stay with the same family for his entire life so he knew what he was up against. Nowadays, we have no clue where we will die or who will take care of us until we do. So, there is quite a bit more confusion when we try to figure out what we should base our actions upon. Our roles are less clearly defined and when someone does try to define a role, we bash them down and call them racist or sexist or some word that ends with ist and then they shut up and anyone else who might come along and try to define a role is stifled and quieted before they even open their mouths. That’s why I think blogs can be of such importance nowadays. People can speak quietly without being afraid of losing the next election or losing their entire customer base. I am not afraid of some nut who would like to get his or her name on TV by calling me names, who cares what they call me? I can write whatever I’d like and I really have nothing to lose. So, I don’t have to worry about political-correctness, I can just be honest and speak my mind in a society where you generally must follow some silly rules to be able to speak publicly. We seem to have found a way to fill our country with people that say what we want to hear. Isn’t that nice? The entire purpose of freedom of speech was to be able to keep us better informed and therefore better able to make informed decisions. But, we stopped that, didn’t we? If you think that this country has freedom of speech, try to stand up and discuss fatherless families amongst the different races. We have the freedom to say politically popular things and no more. How we have learned to trust this government is beyond me. We have allowed ourselves to become dependent upon the same government that tells us what we can and cannot say or do. They have, with the help of a very strange media, cut the ties that bind. It is very unpopular to say that fathers are a good thing. Who needs them? The government has taken the place of them so that’s one tie broken. The nuclear family is no longer of any value and if you get up and try to point that out, you will be called sexist. If you even suggest that certain minorities would be better off if they had a lower fatherless rate, you will be called racist. God forbid you should mention religion in any other than a negative light, you will be called a far right fanatic. So, we have been effectively shut up over the past few decades. We can speak, but we can only say what the media wants us to hear. As a writer, I have seen so many times when liberal publications wouldn’t accept my work unless it was an issue that I had a liberal slant on. The same thing with conservative publications, they won’t buy my work unless I have a conservative slant. So, in this nation of freedom of speech and a free press, this blog is the very first time in my life that I have had freedom of speech or the right to publish whatever I wanted to publish. I wonder how long it will be before someone is offended by a blog and doesn’t like the way it makes them feel. We won’t even have this for very long. Somebody, somewhere, will find a way to sue us. Meg