(This is chapter 10 of "Up and Out," a book condensing my long experience about how to best help poor people. I pledged earlier to get it up online as soon as possible, so it would be available for free to everyone trying to cope with helping the Katrina evacuees.)
(These are not things that need to be done during the first part of this emergency. Rather, this is for the time after that, when Katrina evacuees will be moving from getting immediate emergency assistance to trying to normalize their lives. That is when good programs to help them "up and out" of their situation need to kick in. The following is for that time.)
(For other chapters, look under "Categories" at the left, and click on the chapter you want.)
"UP AND OUT: A GUIDE TO TRUE COMPASSION FOR THE POOR"
PART I: THE AMERICAN POVERTY TRAP
Chapter 10: Can We Fix A Broken Culture?
Those who have any concern about our poor, and those who have any concern for our children and our society, need to work very hard to get unmarried sex, and all that encourages it, out of our environment. Or else we will continue to deal with a cultural and sexual toxic dump that is growing bigger, not shrinking.
But is it useless? Is there any point in tryng?
If there was a time in the past when that worked, then at least we know it happened before. And if there are still people around who can tell us how it was done, that would help.
There was a time, still in living memory, when that happened on a smaller scale. We could start by looking at how that was done. And we can also look at some ways the culture was different then, to see what worked then in the direction we need to go now.
That time was the sea-change in morality between the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. It was relatively quick and abrupt, as these things go. Just a few years.
Those who got shaken back into the traditional morality were a majority. They set about finding ways to corral the bohemian minority who did not want to make the same change, and to protect their children and culture from them.
One of the major changes showed up rather quickly in the movies, which had been a big mover in loosening traditional morality in the 1920s. When the movie makers saw which way the wind was blowing morally in the 1930s, they required their own Hays Office in 1934 to get sexual suggestiveness and excessively violent crime out of movies. The idea was to regulate themselves in order to avoid goverment censorship. So we can see that one way to affect public morality is by persuading industries to police themselves to avoid feeding immorality to the public. If it worked before, it is at least a possibility.
And it did work. Other methods and actions worked too. There was a time, not so long ago, that there was no explicit sex on the screen. When there were limits on how openly erotic clothing could be. When the newsstands were not filled with magazines with cover photos of barely covered bodies in provocative poses. When pornography was poorly done and hard to get.
Such limits could begin to change the toxic culture. Until such action begins, the culture cannot change much. Would censorship be needed? Not if industries would agree to drastically and adequately regulate themselves.
When the movies regulated themselves, it did not seem to hurt their business, which continued to prosper. In fact, movies made then are still considered among the very best. When a script then needed to make a point about sex, it was accomplished without explicit detail. The adults in the audience "got it." The children did not.
Actually, even today there is a huge demand for such "clean" new movies. But the industry resists making them. They seem not to like them. The few that are made, however, are among the biggest money-makers. So more is going on there than simple business considerations! Some observers have commented that they think it is because movie moguls themselves are so locked into the Sexual Revolution.
There are already laws that allow communities to clean up their cultural environment. There just needs to be a greater will to use them.
The media and entertainment industries seem to be the biggest purveyors of unmarried sex and explicit sex to the public. But that did not happen by accident. Those got into the media and entertainment around 1967, because the values being shaped by the Sexual Revolution destroyed the old system of regulation. Unless Americans care enough about the poor (and their own children) to change the Sexual Revolution, the poor will continue to be poor.
If we care about the poor, we have some choices. One is to give up those Sexual Revolution values ourselves. If we continue to hold those values ourselves, we cannot whole-heartedly work to get them out of the public square. Instead, the natural thing to do is to try to promote their acceptance. But even if we do not do that, just our holding such values ourselves cannot help but embed them in the culture to some extent.
For those who care about the poor, but are not willing to give up their own Sex-Revolution values, they can at least support movements, politicians and laws that try to get these out of the public square. And they can keep their views strictly private, trying to keep them from leaking out into public view or hearing. They can allow all that to go back underground, out of public view. That may seem hypocritical, and no one likes hypocrisy. But it is not as bad as harming the poor, and our children, by openly show-casing Sex-Revolution values.
Hypocrisy, after all, is of two kinds. One kind is practiced to avoid harming others. The other is practiced to avoid harming ourselves. There is more sympathy for the first kind. And one of the commendable ways it can be used is to shield others being harmfully influenced by following a bad example from us. That unselfish kind of hypocrisy would be preferable, at this time in our history, to trashing traditional morals by flouting them openly through our public speech and behavior. Hiding such speech and behavior is better for the public than displaying them openly, which risks making them more acceptable. Teaching by bad example needs to be avoided.
Once we set our minds to cleaning up the toxic culture, we will find many ways to work at it. What is needed is simply a powerful determination to get it done. What is needed is not small, but large and drastic. And an unrelenting effort to make this the last generation with Sex-Revolution values dominating the landscape. And by doing so, giving the next generation - our children and grandchildren - a better chance.
That calls for some sacrifice, to be sure. But is this not the generation that has professed to care so much about the poor? Is that asking too much, if that is what it takes? For all our posturing about the poor, do we really care enough about them to break this chain?
Even if we did break the chain-link of fatherlessness in our society, would that eliminate all causes of poverty? No. But it would get rid of the biggest one. The other poverty issues are not as massive or resistant. If we can cut fatherlessness back to the level it was in 1960, poverty should shrink tremendously. Violent crime should also shrink soon after, as a new generation with more fathers grows up. It is something we could see in our lifetimes.
But is it too late? Can it be done? Is it too entrenched? As one who grew up in a society so thoroughly segregated that I could not even imagine a change, yet saw it disappear suddenly, in less than half a decade, I know that even deeply entrenched parts of the culture can be eliminated, sometimes with breathtaking speed.
But this is about sex. Once a population has gotten used to this much sexual freedom, have they ever given it up?
Actually, they have. Not only between the 1920s and the 1930s either. It also happened in England during the reign of Queen Victoria. As summarized by Dr. Myron Magnet;
"Though Cassandras may believe that cultures only rachet downward in an inexorable process of decline, the example of Victorian England proves otherwise: in a single generation, an elite of writers, social reformers, philanthropists and clergymen - backed by an exemplary head of state - turned a gin-swilling nation addicted to cock fights and bull-baiting, with soaring illegitimacy and crime rates and a degraded urban poor living in squalor, into a law-abiding, sober, upright country, with strong families and rising health and prosperity widely difused among the population." [1]
It has indeed happened before. It can happen again. Surely, with all the concern for the poor we claim, with all our great resources and abilities, we are still strong enough and still have heart enough to do this!
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[1] Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare, Encounter Books, 2000, p.10.
