Do you realize the PRICE we are paying for following permissive social and educational theories?
It is time we looked at results — and the wretchedness which is sure to come if drastic changes are not made.
EVEN bandleader Lawrence Welk felt compelled to speak out.
He warned: "Permissiveness and immorality in the United States are very dangerous. You see it in the crime rate. We've got to get back to Christian principles and a decent moral standard. The trend must be reversed if we are going to save ourselves."
America and Britain are sick. Unless basic changes are made in our national policies and individual lives, we are, unquestionably, "sick unto death."
Alarmist, you say?
No, we are dealing with facts. We are dealing with national and historical trends of ominous proportions. The recent campus riots across America are but a symptom of our sickness.
Who taught students to rebel? What basic social and educational philosophy is behind the disruption and disarray now so clearly evident in America's educational system?
And why are our marriages sick? In spite of more "freedoms" and permissiveness, why are college students and other young people more miserable and unhappy than ever before?
WHY We Started Down the Path of Permissiveness
Most of the permissive parents, professors and psychologists are, of course, sincere. They have seen the evils of cruelty toward children in the home and in the school. They tell tales of child beating — of little babies and grade school children with welts all over their bodies, or even broken bones. They have heard or read of young people whose whole personality and approach to life has been warped and stunted by harsh, rigid, unfeeling discipline in the home or school.
And this certainly has been a very real problem over the centuries.
Then the permissive see the cruel and inhuman way that criminals have often been treated: forced to "confess" under physical and mental duress, sometimes kept in jail for weeks or months (in the past) without proper legal counsel and often without even knowing the charges against them.
The sympathetic permissive sees that often the criminal who has no money or who comes from an ethnic minority group is bullied, manhandled, given short shrift and spends far more time in jail than the suave, affluent "city slicker" type criminal who can hire the best lawyers, get out immediately on bail and often evade punishment entirely through legal technicalities and interminable appeals to higher courts.
Needless to say, all of the above does happen — and does need to be changed.
But how?
The Problem
The problem is that human beings nearly always tend to "overreact." We tend to go to one extreme or the other. However, we could seek the safe, sound, balanced "middle-road" solution if we would think our problem through.
Read this somber analysis of our problem in the words of Governor Ronald Reagan of California: "In our humanitarian society we have safeguarded the rights of the accused. Nothing horrifies us so much as the possibility of punishing the non-guilty. But now we have carried this to an excessive concern for the guilty. We do not call the criminal a criminal; he is a patient made ill by the failure of society. And since society cannot be tried for its crime, why should he take the blame?
"Permissiveness from cradle to crime is our philosophy and what were once considered privileges are now recognized as rights, and first and foremost is the right to adjust any grievance by the nearest means at hand, be it rock, club or fire bomb.
"Our Constitution has been eroded by court decisions pretending to extend freedom to all when in reality they gave license to a few. Guilt or innocence is of less importance than the legal niceties. The confessed killer of wife and four children walks free because of his confession, not in spite of it. His lawyer was not present to hear it. Another confessed murderer walks our streets a free man because the police held him too long — a matter of hours — before formally charging him with the crime he had voluntarily confessed."
The Results
No one can deny that the English-speaking peoples of the world are facing a moral toboggan slide. Crime is up, and the lawless elements are bolder than ever before. Riots and rebellion are now commonplace not only in America, but in Britain, Northern Ireland, Canada and Australia as well.
The statistics for forcible rape and all sexual crimes are way up. And the purveyors of filth and pornography are having a heyday.
Speaking of America, noted sportswriter Jim Murray commented that we are "a country that shrinks away from punishing its criminals, disciplining its children and locking up its mad." He likened it to a lamb defending the lion's right to eat it and said, "the Constitution was never conceived as a shield for degeneracy. You start out burning the flag and you end up burning Detroit. A young, vigorous country is immobilized by bumper stickers, slogans, neurotic students with their feet on desks they couldn't make, pulling down universities they wouldn't know how to rebuild."
Some of the results of our permissiveness and lawless society are the following:
• Crime in the U. S. is increasing nearly nine times as fast as population.
• One third of our firstborn children in the United States from 1964 through 1966 were conceived out of wedlock.
• In 1969 there were an estimated 400,000 illegitimate births in the United States.
• A recent survey disclosed that "at least 50% of the female dropouts from high school are pregnant."
• Today, venereal disease is out of control in the United States. It is the number-one communicable disease and the number-two killer among communicable diseases.
• More than one million American women each year resort to illegitimate abortions. An estimated 8,000 women die every year from the consequences.
• Suicide is now the number-one cause of death among all U. S. college students.
For decades we have followed the urgings of the self-appointed "do-gooders" and ultra-liberals. And we have bred a whole generation of malcontents. These undisciplined products of permissive homes, schools and colleges are now beginning to disrupt and destroy the very institutions which gave them license to practice anarchy.
We now have with us a vast segment of society which is delinquent in its responsibility to provide for itself. Other vast numbers have found it impossible to provide for themselves — due to our upside-down society.
We all must pay and pay and pay in an attempt to rectify the omissions of others. So the national economy is being sapped to feed the products of permissive teachings and doings.
We trust our enemies because modern theorists teach that human nature is basically good and that human reason is the key to solving all problems. We support foreign revolutionary "reformers" because do-gooders expound that faulty social or environmental conditions must be eradicated and that the will of the majority is the truth. We allow complete freedom of expression — including smut and filth — because these theorists insist that absolute truth does not exist.
We cannot punish anyone — from rebellious children to psychotic criminals — because permissive psychology stipulates that only ignorance and bad social (environmental) institutions can be blamed — not people.
The Permissives' Dream World
As the permissive thinker views his narrow little world, he is sure of only one thing — that he can never be certain that he knows the truth about anything. “Truth," as defined by these modern thinkers, must necessarily be changing — always in a state of flux.
When applied to human actions, this concept is known as "moral relativism."
This is an age-old ploy of man's deceitful mind — desperately striving to justify his own nasty, secret activities.
Absolute truth of a religious nature is the ingredient most likely to boil blood. All supernatural superstitions, all ingrained religious prejudices, all moral taboos must be expunged from a position of any consequence in human affairs in order to create an "enlightened" world.
Since permissive psychology teaches that there is no eternal truth, there can be no fixed standards by which we can judge any issue, no way of knowing what is right or wrong — and certainly NO Goo to look to for guidance.
For all practical purposes, truth — to the permissive — is simply the present scientific consensus within any given field, and political and racial truth is whatever is voted by the majority. Yet, the permissive radical activists are, in fact, not a majority at all! They are a loud — often violent — minority, attempting to make their voices heard by any convenient method.
Thus, "ultra-liberal" students at Berkeley, Columbia, Kent State and elsewhere feel they have every right to riot, bomb, burn and pillage their campus and community — perhaps even imprisoning for a time some of their permissive professors who taught them this "truth." And if students get shot by the National Guard or police, why aren't these professors who advocated and fulminated student rebellion held at least partially responsible?