by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: April 20, 2010

Most of us who are of a certain age are well aware of a great decline in morals in our society. The time never did exist when adults were perfect and there were no such things as adultery, child molestation or murder, but we neither witnessed nor suffered the volume and frequency of immoral acts that go on today.

It has always been that the adolescent and young adult generations would make efforts to break free of the tyranny and oppression of their previous lives under the rule of parents. This was done by exercising incremental amounts of freedom, throwing out some of the rules that no longer applied, and by challenging the hypocrisy of the previous generation in singular ways.

But the exponential change in capacity to communicate, record, express and to create social movements through technology has allowed adolescent and post adolescent challenge to social values in ways that create a new generation of individuals every two school years, not every twenty years.

Even high school seniors express dismay and awe at the changes in the attitudes and behaviors of high school freshmen, when before, such dismay and awe was reserved for parents who observed their children as they reached certain ages of comparison.

We all face a world where it is common, not rare, for a mother to defend the boyfriend who has killed or beaten her child. Nudity of all types, including the downright anatomically detailed, is easily available. On prime time television, the blurring of genetalia or female breasts does little to hide the fact that a person is nude and even engaging in simulated or real sexual activity.

Promiscuity, unmarried or uncommitted parenthood, the dregs of life in drug addicted relationships is almost becoming boring, it is so widely lived and portrayed in culture. Even celebrations of marriage are treated as opportunities for horrifically spoiled and ill-behaved women to showcase their worst qualities. Depictions of married life often show more murder, abuse and dysfunction than normalcy and the mythical "nuclear" family than ever before.

With the explosion of drug and alcohol abuse, the abnormal has become the normal. But even the normal is more exposed these days than ever before, and it just might be that the nation was never as moral as it professed to be.

 We all must look back to the ways in which we were sheltered or prohibited from knowing the truth of adult situations, unless the truth was part of a person's everyday upbringing in the more dysfunctional households.

There have always been sociopaths who were great people in public, but monsters behind closed doors. There have always been popular community leaders who were dishonest and unethical behind closed doors. There have always been people who were being people with the wrong people in the bedrooms and motel rooms of our society.

Our society needs to take a hard and honest look at the truth: Setting the issues of drug abuse and drug cultures aside,  were there ever truly universal morals that were vastly superior, or is the ability to catch people on video, or to encourage them to act up for reality television cameras giving us a clear look at what has always gone on?

The trend, when we include the drug abuse cultures, is toward more and more shocking violations of even the base morals that any higher animal life forms exhibit, and the trend is alarming.

Given the political, economic and social hardships that we are facing, it is more imperative than ever that deviant expressions of extremist moral ideas do not overwhelm our capacity to exercise basic, common goodness that benefits all.

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