Bullshit. Those are timeless problems… you were just too blind and impotent to do anything about them in “your time”. feel some generational bias. Same old shit… diferent day… broughtvinto the light by your hypocrisy.
This is not the BBQ Pit. Keep your comments on the topic and leave the personal attacks out of this forum.
[ /Moderating ]
Not true. While there are problems in American education, there is no truth to the notion that even a plurality of kids, much less a majority or super-majority of them are not being educated.
Arguable, although only with significant help from lowering taxes while engaging in unnecessary and wildly expensive foreign wars, then failing to watch industries that need to be regulated to avoid problems such as those that ruined the economy beginning a couple of years ago.
Which is no different than earlier times (and was significantly fueled by rhetoric from the political Right, so not really a “liberal” issue).
Which differs from previous years in what way? Do you actually have genuine numbers for recividism? Are you aware of the numbers of overcrowded prisons that are prompting early releases because we decided to lock up people simply for possessing drugs while not engaging in genuinely harmful behavior?
Utter nonsense. Gangs are a very specific problem in quite specific locations and a a claim that “no area” is safe is ludicrously false.
No. Drug use is widespread, but “rife” is a gross exaggeration. And, it should be noted, that a lot of “drug use” in schools, (much like alcohol in previous years as well as today), is experimental in nature and does not tend to extend into adulthood. Does the percentage of people whose lives are ruined by drugs and alcohol differ significantly from the percentge of people whose lives were ruined by alcohol, alone, in previous decades? (And how many of those lives that are “ruined” are exacerbated by having their choice of intoxicant carry an additional burden of illegality while abusers of alcohol suffer no such burden?)
More kids are growing up in single parent homes: true. How many have “virtually no supervision or discipline” is open to question and the number who then fail as adults when compared to children growing up in disfunctional families in previous decades has never even been analyzed.
Only in a limited number of urban situations.
10 children? 12 children? 23 children? A vague statment regarding a rare event supported only by anecdotes.
While there is less civility now than in previous years, I rarely encounter the “aggressive” and “ill-mannered” people on whom you constantly harp and I sometimes wonder if they are simply responding to your attitudes toward them? 
More than half our population (women plus ethnic minorities) are now free to pursue careers once barred to them. Everyone is now free to seek employment and housing without being relegated to economic or housing ghettoes or being denied loans or charged exorbitant interest rates based on their appearance, sex, or neighborhood. You may not see this as an improvement, but I assure you that >50% of the people affected by these changes do.
Beyond that, the simple fact that there are 300,000,000 of us instead of 154,000,000 of us means that it is easier to find more examples of problems. Many of those “bigger” problems would have been bigger even if there had never been any societal changes in the last 40 years.
And you can stay off my lawn, too.
EDIT: I’ll retract this, based on the mod’s previous warning to another poster.
Not to mention the advent of technology allowing information to be captured and transmitted far more easily than it used to.
Anecdote: I just recently watched a video of a woman hitting a pedestrian with her car and driving away. (The person taking the video dropped his friend off to check on the victim then chased the woman down while calling the police, but that’s not germane to the point.) In the video comments, someone noted that they’d seen a couple of hit-and-run videos lately, and lamented the possibility that such things were on the rise. But really, what’s more likely: that people are becoming more immoral by the day such that there’s a noticeable rise in hit-and-run incidents, or that more and more people have immediate access to portable recording devices plus a Youtube account so that such incidents are now more easily able to be disseminated?
Shifts in society have certainly led to some changes in behavior, but not all are necessarily negative, and some perceived shifts are not shifts at all. I mean, lamenting about children engaging in sex play? Have you never heard of children playing Doctor? It’s not exactly a new thing.
That would matter if you were black or white. Obviously being white it is sentimentally the good old days for my family… if I were black or hispanic obviously it would not be the good old days.
Although actually they were partly good old days, it seems to me that there was not the whole hos vs bros outlook, I seem to remember reading that there were actually black men married and working normal boring jobs … if you read Manchild in the Promised Land there were black families in the ghettos, men married to women having kids, holding jobs, in ‘healthy’ activities like going to sports activities, church activities, kids going to school, dating. Yes there were junkies and alcoholics, but there was parenting going on. The jobs were all blue collar [except for a few professionals that managed to get degrees through scholarships, and people who worked hard and owned small stores and restaurants.] It seems that the Vietnam era is where ghetto society broke down into what it is today, rampant gangs, drugs, breakdown of traditional family life.
I daresay the average 15-year-old in America today is significantly more knowledgeable and sophisticated than a 15-year-old in 1955. Access to a medium like the Internet (which, at its present state of development, illiterates can’t fully use) makes a big difference, even for a kid who just wants to find the porn.
:rolleyes: You might say the Defense Department is bankrupting the country with equal, nay, better justice.
:dubious: That was the case every decade since Independence.
Not any more, we don’t. Are you posting from 1980 or what?!
Bullshit. I live in a pretty sizeable town, and there is gang activity, but you just need to avoid certain neighborhoods and you’ll never see a hint of it.
That’s after the massive anti-'60s cultural backlash known as the “War on Drugs.” Having second thoughts, are we?
True.
False.
Not a new thing. Read Harlan Ellison’s Memos from Purgatory (1961).
Don’t worry. A little Satanic ritual abuse will put the fear into those horny little imps. 
Compared to 1955 that’s an improvement. Og, “Bob” and Allah, who in their right or any mind would want to live in a Father Knows Best society?!
“Pardon me mister negro, but you seem to be drinking at a water fountain reserved for whites only. If you wouldn’t mind, would you please vacate the premises before we are forced to apply a blast of ulra-high pressure water from a fire hose to you? Thank you, that’s a good chap.”
“Why, I say, I am greatly pleased that that gentleman did not use a truly terrible word such as ‘fuck’!”
“Help, police, I’ve just been savagely raped, repeatedly and remorselessly, please protect me and punish my rapist!”
“Certainly ma’am, we have great respect for the fairer sex and greatly regret that such an indignity was done to your person. Now, can you please tell us about your attacker?”
“Well, it was my husband and he…”
“What the deuce, your husband you say? My good woman, you should know full well that marital rape is legal. Now return to your domicile and let this be a lesson to you the next time your husband demands that he be allowed to place his sexual organ within your unmentionable anatomical feature.”
“My, that policeman was so polite. To think, if Liberals ruled the world, he might have used the word ‘cunt’!”
Sam Stone, as usual, offer excellent insight. I wanted say that the two working parents are an extreme cause of what we are talking about. I know that it is necessary in most cases today. I know that women want to pursue careers and there is nothing wrong with that.
But community relations and civility have got to improve when half of the population is not in the workforce, but at home in the neighborhood talking to each other, making friends, and doing favors for each other. Then, on weekends, the wives would set up a social gathering and the husbands would meet. Today, we are too busy running to the store, running to soccer practice, running, running, running.
Never mind the benefits of the working parent coming home to a clean house, a hot meal, and rested children. Never mind that the kids aren’t shuttled off to day care like they are a bother; they stay at home and bond with the parent and make friends in the neighborhood.
The biggest reason, IMHO, for the civility back in the old days is that there were actually PEOPLE in the neighborhood during waking hours instead of your neighborhood being a place you crash after work + other duties.
It is the need for two incomes that has everyone “running, running, running” without the time to engage in those Suzy-homemaker activities.
Are you going to claim that the stagnation, even the decline, of real earnings in the middle class was somehow caused by liberals? I think that would be a mistake.
The obvious solution is to legalize polygamy. The junior wife can be the housewife while the elder has the career. Everybody’s happy! 
So it’s all the fault of those ungrateful women? I know MY life would be better with a full time stay at home wife to cook and clean, watch the house and build up valuable social capital with my neighbors. I want a pretty one who obeys me. It’s what’s best for the community.
Come to think of it, maybe we could get genetic engineers to breed us some pre-lobotimized Stepfords. We’ll use them for everything except reproduction.
I’m down with that! I’ll take two, please.
Do you have any actual statistics or facts to back up any of these assertions? Or is this simply more “shit was better in my day” ranting?
I think you’re way off the mark about the war not being the catalyst for creating unity amongst the demographic being used as cannon fodder.
There were hippies in other places, but those movements were nothing like what was happening in the streets of America.
I think most kids were happy to buy Beatles albums and drink the Koolaid that prosperity provided them. Right up until they realized that prosperity and access to better schools, meant they’d go to college and avoid the draft, while kids, just like them, without the funds for college, or access to decent schools, were dying by the thousands fighting a war they didn’t give a shit about.
It was galvanizing. To understate it’s significance does a great disservice to historical facts, in my mind.
From that very galvanizing came support for the equal rights movement, the birth of the women’s movement, and the ending of a war who’s sole purpose seemed to be keeping unemployment low and industry humming. When they challenged their parents beliefs and marched in the streets the parents were pissed. When they were shot down, for exercising their right to protest, their parents began to question the government they had previously believed.
It changed everything.
Its obviously all the fault of Hunter Thompson.
I didn’t blame liberals or anyone else. It may be a simple fact of life that 2 incomes families are needed to survive in the modern world. Of course “survive” now means two cars, cable internet, cellphones, and large homes. Definitely something to think about, though that horse has sailed and the ship left the barn.
I guess my first sentences went unread. I understand that the days of Suzy homemaker are over and women are now even expected to pursue careers. I offered my thoughts without comment.
And your comments about the ideal wife are incredibly short-sighted. She needs large breasts as well. 
Plus no power of speech, short stature, a flat-topped skull, and a cocaine dealership.