What Ever Happened to Beaver??

I used to think we lived in a pretty good world. Boy was I wrong! Of course I didn't realize how very ignorant I was until I read Dennis Prager's column on Townhall.com, titled "When I Was A Boy, America Was A Better Place." You see, this is something I'd never heard of before: an old man complaining that the world is different from when he grew up. Inconceivable!! And while Mr. Prager may be nearing that age where his foods might not be solid, it's good to know that his arguments and Grandpa Simpson-esque complaints still are.

The day the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced, I said to my then-teenage son, "David, please forgive me. I am handing over to you a worse America than my father handed over to me." Unfortunately, I still feel this way.

With the important exception of racial discrimination -- which was already dying a natural death when I was young -- it is difficult to come up with an important area in which America is significantly better than when I was a boy. But I can think of many in which its quality of life has deteriorated.

Yeah, a guilty man walked free from a crime because he had money to pay for an expensive attorney. I'm with ya Dennis.

And of course he's right that when he was a boy, racial discrimination "was already dying a natural death." Prager was born in that luckiest of times to be a minority: Just after WWII, in 1948. He was just a young child in 1954 for the natural chain of events that led to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. We all know that nothing is more natural than the progression of a segregation trial that ends up in the Supreme Court of the United States.

He was just a 7-year old boy when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. And if I've read my history correctly, at the time everyone pretty much felt she was in the right, because racial descrimination was a dying entity.

Luckily for Prager, he was a boy in his mid-teens in 1963 when Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, which pretty much put an end to any and all discrimination. I don't think there's been any since, right? Ahhhhhh, the natural death of racial discrimination.

Today, people at work, to cite but one example, are far less free to speak naturally. Every word, gesture and look, even one's illustrated calendar, is now monitored lest a fellow employee feel offended and bring charges of sexual harassment or creating a "hostile work environment" or being racially, religiously or ethnically insensitive, or insensitive to another's sexual orientation.

It was so much nicer back in Prager's day when you didn't have to worry about being racially, religiously or ethnically sensitive -- you just didn't have to hire those kinds of people if you didn't want to. How simple was that?? And as for someone's sexual orientation? If we can't even expect our military to exclude gays, what hope does the work force have? Right on Dennis!

When I was a 7-year-old boy, I flew alone from New York to my aunt and uncle in Miami and did the same thing coming back to New York. I boarded the plane on my own and got off the plane on my own. No papers for my parents to fill out. No extra fee to pay the airline. I was responsible for myself. Had I run away or been kidnapped, no one would have sued the airline. Today, fear of lawsuits is a dominant fact of American life.

I feel horrible for Mr. Prager. When he was 7, it was right at the same time as the Rosa Parks bus incident. Luckily, on an airplane in 1955, little Dennis didn't need to worry about any black people sitting in his seat, since white people wouldn't hire them and they couldn't afford the ticket.

I just don't understand why we don't send more children cross-country on their own. Where is the harm in that? What is this country coming to? It's lawsuit this, and lawsuit that...and all because people saw a way to punish -- after getting screwed by -- bigger corporations with pocketbooks deeper than the chasm that those aliens were found in The Abyss. Granted, an upset lawyer suing a dry-cleaner for $65 million might be a bit excessive, but they DID lose his pants after all.

When I was boy, I was surrounded by adult men. Today, most American boys (and girls, of course) come into contact with no adult man all day every school day. Their teachers and school principals are all likely to be women. And if, as is often the case, there is no father at home (not solely because of divorce but because "family" courts have allowed many divorced mothers to remove fathers from their children's lives), boys almost never come into contact with the most important group of people in a boy's life -- adult men.

Several good points here!!

a) teachers and school principals are likely to be women now?? *sigh* Can't we just ask them if they're a woman when they apply for the job in the first place and then just not hire them? Apparently not any more.

b) and what's up with family courts (or "family" courts, as Dennis likes to put it) not granting custody to unfit fathers? If a father drinks too much, is abusive, or has a tendency to throw key-parties with the neighbors, then what right does a divorcing mother have to remove and protect her child from that behavior? It's sad to think that if I get caught blowing lines of coke off of a hooker's thigh, that I might lose the weekend privelages with my 5-year old boy. How am I supposed to bond with him? Seriously, that'll really make you think twice, so that you don't get caught.

When I was a boy, the purpose of American history textbooks was to teach American history. Today, the purpose of most American history texts is to make minorities and females feel good about themselves. As a result, American kids today are deprived of the opportunity to feel good about being American (not to mention deprived of historical truth). They are encouraged to feel pride about all identities -- African-American, Hispanic, Asian, female, gay -- other than American.

I'm with Dennis: I hate that we try to make people -- especially those who have been oppressed, ridiculed and discriminated against -- "feel good about themselves." Why should they be made to feel proud of their heritage? Shouldn't they mock it like Americans used to do? That ought to make them feel proud to be an American!! Because it's not the fact that we're all equal in this country that matters; it's the fact that we're all the same, no matter where we came from....you know, as long as we diminish any importance to where we actually came from. Because America isn't supposed to be the great melting pot of rich histories -- it's supposed to be a bunch of suburban Americans going out to The Melting Pot for fondue.

When I was a teenage boy, getting to kiss a girl, let alone to touch her thigh or her breast (even over her clothes) was the thrill of a lifetime. Most of us could only dream of a day later on in life when oral sex would take place (a term most of us had never heard of). But of course, we were not raised by educators or parents who believed that "teenagers will have sex no matter what." Most of us rarely if ever saw a naked female in photos (the "dirty pictures" we got a chance to look at never showed "everything"), let alone in movies or in real life. We were, in short, allowed to be relatively innocent. And even without sex education and condom placement classes, few of us ever got a girl pregnant.

Wow!! What happened to those good old days when a teenage boy received the thrill of a lifetime by touching a girl's thigh? Ahhhh, those innocent 1960s that he recalls.....those must have been the days!! Forget for a moment the obvious innocence of teenagers in the 60s. It must have been such a blessing for the adults and teachers to just blindly believe that the kids weren't having sex or doing drugs, or watching Elvis Presley shake his hips. Much better to close your eyes to the reality of the 1960s and perceive the "Leave-It-To-Beaver reality" that you choose to believe in, than to maybe confront those issues. In fact, why do we even try to inform and protect a teenager who engages in sexual activity? Shouldn't we just ensure their ignorance on the subject so that they can make their decisions without the knowledge that we posess on dieases and pregnancies? Can't we go back to those innocent days where we could just chastise anyone who got pregnant as a teenager or caught a disease because they had it coming to them?!

When I was a boy, "I Love Lucy" showed two separate beds in Lucy and Ricky's bedroom -- and they were a married couple. Today, MTV and most TV saturate viewers' lives with sexual imagery and sexual talk, virtually all of which is loveless and, of course, non-marital.

When I was boy, people dressed up to go to baseball games, visit the doctor and travel on airplanes. Today, people don't dress up even for church.

Think about how much better it would be if our parents slept in separate beds? Then marriage could be viewed as it's supposed to be: like summer camp.

And yeah, it's a horrible society where people actually want to be comfortable for a crammed, 4-hour flight in coach from Cincinnati to Salt Lake City. If the person next to you is going to make disgusting sniffing noises all flight, slurp his orange juice and smell bad, the least he could be doing is wearing a sweater vest.

Can we return to the America of my youth? No. Can we return to the best values of that time? Yes. But not if both houses of Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court move the country even further leftward. If that happens, many of the above noted changes will simply be accelerated.

Yes, Mr. Prager is absolutely right! How did we even let the country deteriorate to the point where he's so very ashamed of it? It must have been all of those liberal, left-wing Democrats that we've elected President in the last 40 years...you know, both of them! Since 1969 (when Prager was 21), Jimmy Carter was President for 4 years, and Bill Clinton for 8. Those 12 years out of the last 40 under a Democratic Preisdent surely destroyed his innocence. I guess we can only thank the other 32 years of Republican Presidencies that we're not even worse off than we are.

One can only hope that a 71-year old white man can win the office of President in November, so that he can continue providing our young, innocent children what we're supposed to provide them with: death in an unnecessary war, isolation from the world, further neglection of the middle class so as to continue building the empires of the richest 1%.....and the hope to one day feel a girl's breast. I lament with you Mr. Prager.