I see a couple of “facts” there strung together by a lot of personal opinion but none of it points to the highly organized and well-kept secret movement that Ed so often mentions.
It is not a secret. It is now called the Culture War.
Learn to distinguish facts from mere opinion.
Thank you, Ed. I understand now where you are coming from.
Good question!
Same here
One could say that the world you describe was simply much more supportive of our feeling “good about being as good as I could be”. And while truth and justice or righteousness (the basic teachings of the Church, IOW) still demand that we strive for that goodness the “new world” we live in no longer agrees or supports us in it to a very great degree if at all. But the reasons for the fragmentation of society away from a wholesome perspective and pursuits is complex, IMO, a consequence of human history as it’s evolved to this point in time, and Vatt II may well have anticipated it, while in any case having nothing to do with precipitating it.
Unfortunately the sixties brought a lot of bad to the world, there’s good people from the time but morality just decreased fast.
It’s not complex. The simple fact that chastity was so degraded by the sudden appearance of porn (Adult) Bookstores, which sold magazines with obscene ads inviting anyone to have sex the with women pictured in them, and the sudden appearance of topless bars and strip clubs. No faithful Catholic asked for any of this. It took millions of dollars, was highly coordinated and was protected by high priced lawyers. People did this, not history. Then we had dissidents inside the Church defying Pope Paul VI and his encyclical Humanae Vitae. On top of that, the makers of The Pill had to move product. The media gradually poisoned hearts and minds by slowly giving us bad examples till today.
I would disagree Ed with your view of the sixties
I know about all of the above. I was there in the 1950s. I would never call it idyllic but it was a lot better than what we have now. Our government, media and many people in general, respected and reflected Christian values. Newspapers printed beautiful articles about the birth of Christ. We did not lock our doors at night. Sure, there was crime and other issues, like the US and USSR deploying Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. We didn’t lose a second of sleep over it. My dad was a World War II vet and he and our neighbors knew how to live. Get married, raise your own kids, maintain the family car and work. Plus enjoy some time with your family that did not involve multiple electronic devices.
All it took was concupiscence: the age-old lust for money, power, sex, etc. Why so many more people were influenced by it all during the 60’s had to do with greater affluence in the west where it all began (people tend to forsake discipline when they have more time and money on their hands), new technology, the impact of modernism/effects of the enlightenment, all converging during this one historical era IMO.
Not at all. We lived in middle-class neighborhoods but we had one thing in common: we were content with what we had. Our parents kept their appliances running and they were not replaced every year with a new model. They ran for a very long time. Tuition to Catholic school for two kids was still a lot, but most us lived in wood-frame homes and had wholesome media and hobbies. A long-distance phone call was a big deal. We only had one black and white TV. The community was centered around the Church and we had lots of fun. If I wanted a certain toy or book, I cut grass or shoveled snow. Kids did chores around the house. I cut the front and back grass with a push lawnmower. People put money in the bank every payday, and we had a reserve for a “rainy day.” We went to local orchards and picked fruit. Some moms did canning so we could have some in the Winter. We had nothing fancy.
We’re been suffering the consequences of *Original Sin *since it was committed. People are never satisfied, even if they might appear to approach a semblance of it for brief periods in time. Even then it’s shinier on the outside than the inside. Eden and all it entailed wasn’t good enough for Adam; we play out the same pattern-the same rebellion-over and over again in this world.
That is a very false but very common response.I think there is a lot of over-simplification going on here.
Fixing appliances instead of throwing them out?! A lot of appliances back then were mechanical rather than electronic, so it was easier for a mechanically-minded person to fix them. This has nothing to do with encroaching immorality and the loss of influence of the Catholic Church in the daily lives of Her people.
We need to hold onto our common sense. Next we’ll be saying that the polio vaccine was the cause of the downslide into immorality.
One thing that comes to my mind when reading edwest2’s posts about life in the 1950s is that for many black families, this wasn’t what life was like. They were segregated into their own neighborhoods and schools, and the laws supported this segregation. It wasn’t idyllic at all for them. It was scary, because they were at the mercy of those who felt that black people were inferiors.
That’s one reason that rebellion broke loose in the 1960s–the U.S. blacks had had enough, and when leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King came along, with the talent and God-given calling to lead them and to influence lawmakers, black people rose up and demanded civil rights. I don’t blame them, and I see no evil in this, but rather, much good.
Their plight gave other groups the courage to speak up, too. edwest2 is extolling the beauty of family life back then, but for many women, life WASN’T beautiful. They had no money and no means of making money and no security at all. Their husbands could do whatever they pleased to them, and the laws protected the husband even if he was a alcoholic, a pervert, or a violent abuser. I personally think that women went the wrong way by trying to negate the differences between the sexes (e.g., fertility and ability to bear children), but I see nothing evil about women rising up and demanding that the laws protect their rights to own property, play sports, land and hold down a high-paying job in any field, prosecute their husbands for abusive behavior, etc.
And we must never forget that a lot of the protesting that happened in the U.S. was over the Viet Nam war, which was a daily reality for the entire decade into the early 1970s. This wasn’t the same war as WWII, where it was obvious who the enemy was and what the consequences would be for failure to win this war. To this day, the reasons for the Viet Nam war are confusing to many Americans. It’s no wonder that young people rose up and said, “hell no, we won’t go” to a war that made no sense and was not being fought to protect the United States. I don’t blame them–my husband missed the draft by only a few years. How horrible that the U.S. forced young men (at least those with no money and no political clout) to leave their families and go off to a country and fight for…what?!
One of the good results of that protesting is that we now have a volunteer army with no draft, and it’s as strong as ever (although President Obama is doing his best to undermine it by reducing its numbers).
All of this unrest was very scary because whenever there are movements of the people, there are extremists who push the movement out towards the fringes and who advocate violence as a means to achieve the desired ends. We see this today with the anti-abortion movement–it is a glorious thing to protest the taking of innocent life, but we all know that there are the very few extremists who take it too far and assume the right to kill the abortionists. These extremists do not make the anti-abortion movement wrong, do they?
On top of everything else, in the 1960s the media technology improved to the point where many families owned a television and were able to actually SEE, on a daily basis, all the violent protests happening. That’s one reason it was so scary.
There are no simple, one-phrase answers to the OP’s question, and going back to a time when we all had one black-and-white TV is not the answer to the continuing downslide of morality in the world.
The culture changed rapidly in a very brief span of years, and that promotes these questions and answers which reflect a good deal of the complacency of Catholics and Americans during the '50s. There was little reflection at the time between the difference between morality and conformity – and once the social pressure to conform changed to social pressure to anarchical conformity, many, including many Catholics, easily adapted to the norms of relativism. Many of those who as students plunged into radical movements returned to the suburbs and to self-promotion and complacent surface mores once the winds shifted again. As Vera Brittain observed, as the wife of a Cornell professor in the 1930s, Americans in general always spoke of freedom while practicing excessive conformity (I don’t have the exact quote at hand).I think there is a lot of over-simplification going on here.
Fixing appliances instead of throwing them out?! A lot of appliances back then were mechanical rather than electronic, so it was easier for a mechanically-minded person to fix them. This has nothing to do with encroaching immorality and the loss of influence of the Catholic Church in the daily lives of Her people.
We need to hold onto our common sense. Next we’ll be saying that the polio vaccine was the cause of the downslide into immorality.
One thing that comes to my mind when reading edwest2’s posts about life in the 1950s is that for many black families, this wasn’t what life was like. They were segregated into their own neighborhoods and schools, and the laws supported this segregation. It wasn’t idyllic at all for them. It was scary, because they were at the mercy of those who felt that black people were inferiors.
That’s one reason that rebellion broke loose in the 1960s–the U.S. blacks had had enough, and when leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King came along, with the talent and God-given calling to lead them and to influence lawmakers, black people rose up and demanded civil rights. I don’t blame them, and I see no evil in this, but rather, much good.
Their plight gave other groups the courage to speak up, too. edwest2 is extolling the beauty of family life back then, but for many women, life WASN’T beautiful. They had no money and no means of making money and no security at all. Their husbands could do whatever they pleased to them, and the laws protected the husband even if he was a alcoholic, a pervert, or a violent abuser. I personally think that women went the wrong way by trying to negate the differences between the sexes (e.g., fertility and ability to bear children), but I see nothing evil about women rising up and demanding that the laws protect their rights to own property, play sports, land and hold down a high-paying job in any field, prosecute their husbands for abusive behavior, etc.
And we must never forget that a lot of the protesting that happened in the U.S. was over the Viet Nam war, which was a daily reality for the entire decade into the early 1970s. This wasn’t the same war as WWII, where it was obvious who the enemy was and what the consequences would be for failure to win this war. To this day, the reasons for the Viet Nam war are confusing to many Americans. It’s no wonder that young people rose up and said, “hell no, we won’t go” to a war that made no sense and was not being fought to protect the United States. I don’t blame them–my husband missed the draft by only a few years. How horrible that the U.S. forced young men (at least those with no money and no political clout) to leave their families and go off to a country and fight for…what?!
One of the good results of that protesting is that we now have a volunteer army with no draft, and it’s as strong as ever (although President Obama is doing his best to undermine it by reducing its numbers).
All of this unrest was very scary because whenever there are movements of the people, there are extremists who push the movement out towards the fringes and who advocate violence as a means to achieve the desired ends. We see this today with the anti-abortion movement–it is a glorious thing to protest the taking of innocent life, but we all know that there are the very few extremists who take it too far and assume the right to kill the abortionists. These extremists do not make the anti-abortion movement wrong, do they?
On top of everything else, in the 1960s the media technology improved to the point where many families owned a television and were able to actually SEE, on a daily basis, all the violent protests happening. That’s one reason it was so scary.
There are no simple, one-phrase answers to the OP’s question, and going back to a time when we all had one black-and-white TV is not the answer to the continuing downslide of morality in the world.
Excellent advice…for everyone.