Another Look at Moral Decay

According to Clayton Cramer:

As I have aged, my repulsion at this degradation that the left has infected our culture with just enrages me. When I was growing up, there was drug abuse. There were orgies and other forms of casual sex, where people were just used, and feelings got hurt. But that was largely high school and college, not junior high and upper grades of elementary school. I am not sure that I want to live another hundred years, and see the evil that will become the norm.

Speaking as someone who walked out on pot parties in the 1970s (I was one of the “anti-social malcontents”), I find it very hard to believe that the current generation could possibly be worse. We no longer have a situation where nearly everyone in an age group floated through college in a semi-conscious haze and made up for that by getting their ideas from people who were just as stoned. We're still suffering from the aftermath, of course. Today's environmental enthusiasms are easier to understand when we recall that they were invented by ex-stoners. In any case, I suspect people who got stoned in elementary school are less likely to be able to put through an idiotic policy than people who waited until college.

In any case, a large part of the drug-culture mystique came from the belief that we would get ever more “liberated” in the glorious future. By the late 1980s, the drug culture started looking hopelessly obsolete (except possibly in backwards areas such as Northern California). It may return—it did return a little in the mid-1990s—but it's unlikely to be unanimous again.