Daily Verse | Judges 1:8
The men of Judah attacked Jerusalem also and took it.
They put the city to the sword and set it on fire.

Happy Friday, Broadside friends. I sometimes think there’s too much bustle in my hedgerow.

One day, several years ago, my mom told me that she was glad she wasn’t raising children in today’s world. “It’s just so different and much harder than it was when I was a young mom,” she said.

I agreed with her. I was born at the tail end of the baby boom generation in the era of prosperity that followed the end of World War II. My first years of childhood were carefree. I had friends my age on my block and at the grade school I walked to. Our suburb was lily white, like me, and the culture shared similar values. (I’ll probably be canceled for saying that.) Even as small children, we could play outside all day on weekends with our friends in the neighborhood until parents would call their kids for dinner at the family table.

I can’t possibly list all the differences thirty years make, but by the time my wife and I were raising children our society had drastically changed. The Christian values we had been raised with were no longer a defining characteristic of the culture. Our neighborhood friends included Latinos, Polish and mixed race families. (I’ll probably be canceled for saying that, too.) The Columbine High School shooting had taken place in 1999 and became a defining moment for us as parents—we chose to homeschool partly because of that event. We always knew where our children were and kept them close because it felt like things were coming apart.

And they were. Even in the years since our children were small, our society has become further unglued, with an astonishing lack of literacy, critical thinking and common sense. And always more extreme behaviors and demands for acceptance that push the boundaries of credulity. We’re a dumbed-down society that is slowly being turned into a socialist state.

The sense of societal decay I’m describing was captured by Peggy Noonan in a column for the Wall Street Journal back in 2005. In an essay called “A Separate Peace,” she writes in her introduction,

I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon.

A few paragraphs later, she tells a story about Teddy Kennedy, the venerable Senator from Massachusetts (1962-2009).

Do people fear the wheels are coming off the trolley? Is this fear widespread? A few weeks ago I was reading Christopher Lawford’s lovely, candid and affectionate remembrance of growing up in a particular time and place with a particular family, the Kennedys, circa roughly 1950-2000. It’s called “Symptoms of Withdrawal.” At the end he quotes his Uncle Teddy. Christopher, Ted Kennedy and a few family members had gathered one night and were having a drink in Mr. Lawford’s mother’s apartment in Manhattan. Teddy was expansive. If he hadn’t gone into politics he would have been an opera singer, he told them, and visited small Italian villages and had pasta every day for lunch. “Singing at la Scala in front of three thousand people throwing flowers at you. Then going out for dinner and having more pasta.” Everyone was laughing. Then, writes Mr. Lawford, Teddy “took a long, slow gulp of his vodka and tonic, thought for a moment, and changed tack. ‘I’m glad I’m not going to be around when you guys are my age.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.’ “

Even liberal lion Ted Kennedy knew that things were falling apart back then—and we don’t even know when “back then” was. Probably in the 1990s. Kennedy died in 2009 at age 77.

The point is that our society is falling apart and people as diverse as a 1960-1970s homemaker, her son, a WSJ columnist and a long-term Senator feel (and felt) it happening. Most of us probably do. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve reached peak disintegration. But it’s coming faster and more furiously than it ever has.

All of this to say—I wonder what I’ll be saying to my kids when they have children of their own.

[Image: cmssix.com]