angrycarpenter (916 posts) Fri Mar-07-08 06:06 PM
Response to Original message
7. Ronald Reagan
Hmmm, that's crediting an awful lot of power and influence to one man over an eight year period. So he singlehandedly changed the social mores of every man woman and child not only during his tenure as POTUS, but also in the intervening twenty years since then?
I agree that society as a whole has coarsened considerably and become more apathetic, but I see it more as a cumulative effect of 40+ years of "progressive" influence. I use scare quotes around the word because it's not progress in the popularly-understood context of
betterment, much as its adherents would like folks to believe, but rather a simple movement from Point A to Point B without regard for the consequences.
Sometimes the status quo or even regression ain't all that bad, especially when "progress" consists of a headlong rush into Hell.
No, todays societal decline has at its core many things, including but not limited to:
Human life being redefined as a "choice", and the resulting holocaust of 45,000,000 unborn children. To borrow a line from one of my favorite authors, "Life is cheap. Abortion makes it cheaper."
Disposable marriages, liberalized divorce laws, and the single parent families that result from them.
The entitlement mentality.
The mainstreaming of sexual perversions.
The tendency to blame Man first, especially successful white men.
The tendency to blame America first.
The removal of the stigma surrounding illegitimacy.
The removal of the stigma surrounding drug use.
The removal of the stigma surrounding crude public behavior.
The removal of the stigma surrounding anything.
Moral equivalency and situation ethics.
Sex, violence, and the lionization of anti-heroes and sociopaths in popular media.
Substituting political correctness for straight talk and the chilling effect it has had on debate.
The removal of God from public discourse.
The indulgence and lack of discipline in children.
The rationalization of criminal and other antisocial behavior, i.e. blaming anyone and anything for the criminals' behavior except the criminal him/herself.
Each and every one of these phenomena can be laid to a major degree at the feet of Liberals and their unholy god of "progress". I find it much more intuitive that the pernicious effects of the above has resulted in the societal decay we are now faced with rather than the influence of one man over a period of a few years.
Perhaps the liberals will include the above list in their next treatise on what we should "Thank a liberal for...".