The signs of disintegration are everywhere.
Something dreadfully WRONG is happening to our peoples.
We're rapidly losing character — losing our ability to blush, our sense of shame.
Perhaps most sickening of all, we're learning not to care.
OUR SOCIETY is sick. We are no longer a "great" society, no longer even a "good" society. Our society is becoming evil.
We have lost our way.
We don't know what we stand for, where we're going, who or what we are.
We have no goal.
All you see around you today — the problems that concern people most — are but symptoms of a dread national sickness. The price-rigging executive, the turned-off, long-haired youth, the screaming hard-hat, the violent demonstrators, the sick killer — these are mere symptoms of a deeper malaise.
We're just not "good" any more. We're losing our sense of what is "good." We're floundering in a mad sea of hate, where bickering, backbiting, name-calling, fault-finding, blame-placing and biased labelism replaces kindness, patience, understanding, and love.
Why? What's happening to us?
A president is burned in effigy, and a war criminal is a hero.
The kids who scornfully ridicule the "establishment" for its "hang-ups" scream for the legalization of "pot," and the right to their own terrible hang-up. Lampooning the establishment for its habits, they demand legal permission to plunge into their own ever more degenerative habits. We seek to replace evil with evil, add poison to poison, pile abuse upon abuse, hoping all this constitutes a cure for our ills.
Criminals are admired, and public protests cry out for their absolution and release. Sensational trials elicit sobs of sympathy for the accused, and calloused indifference toward the victims or the loved ones of the victims.
We have lost our sense of values. We're not sure, now, what is "truth" or "right." And in this lies a more deadly peril for America than any other problem of our age.
Still, in spite of the desperate need to recapture lost values and to rekindle the spiritual and moral principles we have trodden underfoot — perhaps the deepest sickness of all is our inability to care.
Millions do care; but too many millions — far too many — do not.
People's "MIS" concern
Ask most Americans what issue concerns them the most. With almost bovine-like placidity, they'll answer "Vietnam." Why? They know the war is "bad." Somehow all the demonstrations have finally hit home. Millions of Americans, more "hawkish" toward American involvement in Vietnam only a few years ago, are being gradually brought around to the anti-war view which they scorned only months before. Surely, Americans are dying in Vietnam, albeit not anywhere nearly approaching the rate of those dying yearly on our streets and highways, or from heart disease, cancer, or any number of other diseases, but dying, nevertheless.
So they want the boys home. Now. But it's apparently perfectly all right to maintain any number of troops in South Korea, in Europe, or other areas of the world where U.S. troops go daily about the business of helping the United States police the entire globe.
The concern over Vietnam is highly illustrative of our lack of VALUES, and our wrong sense of PRIORITY! Of course Vietnam is a useless, no-win war, with an enemy granted sanctuary, where "victory" is not now, and never has been, the policy. This magazine has continually documented the hugely burdensome costs, not only in human life and property, but in the American economy, of the Vietnam War.
And we have also continually said Vietnam will soon be paled into insignificance in the face of the really HUGE problems of the near future!
Recent Gallup Polls illustrated once again our lack of perception — our wrong priorities. We become disturbed over terrible consequences. We are earnestly desirous of removing certain effects, while we are totally unconcerned with the CAUSES that produce those consequences — those effects.
Look at the list of on-the-street concerns of most Americans.
A recent Gallup Poll showed the first concern to be Vietnam. Then followed the economy, other international problems, drug addiction, crime and ecology.
Then came education, and finally, at the bottom of the list (only 2 percent placed this as the most important problem facing the U.S.) came the morals crisis, and our spiritual poverty!
Where went our sense of values?
Are we so stupefied by sensationalized stories of the Vietnam war, so dull-witted by the more than five hours per day spent in watching television, so brainwashed by the continual hue and cry of the protesters, so mindlessly driven by our own fleshly appetites and desires that we can no longer see the plain CAUSE of our problems?
For every effect there is a CAUSE. Things don't just "happen." Things are caused to happen.
The Gallup Poll proves most of us tend to look to the effect of evil causes, and attempt to remove the effect. We seldom delve deeper, discovering the CAUSE of the evil effect, and strive to remove the cause.
While we struggle mightily over the effects — rioting, demonstrating, worrying, legislating, voting, protesting, or even praying — we leave undiscovered, and undisturbed, the basic, underlying CAUSE of the effects we seek to remove!
It is our lack of right education (placed second from the bottom as a concern of most Americans), our lack of understanding the TRUE VALUES of life — what we are, where we're going, what is our PURPOSE in life — that is a major CAUSE of many of our evils all around us.
It is primarily our utter lack of contact with God, OUR CHARACTER drain that lies at the root of ALL our other problems.
America's Character Drain
Our people are growing sicker. Most of us have failed in our personal duty. Parents have failed in their responsibility toward their children; parents have failed toward each other; our homes and families are in a rapid process of disintegration; and we don't seem to care.
We most desperately need to recapture sound, true values — and it MUST BEGIN IN THE HOME!
Character is the result of motive. Motive is produced by having a GOAL.
But America has no goal. There is no great cause toward which we unitedly press. There is no transcendental commission sacred to us all — no great, supranational calling, or mission, which inspires us and drives us on toward achievement. Even the great causes of the past — "Manifest Destiny," "White Man's Burden" — are suspect in our modern frenzy of destruction of all historical values.
Because we have no GOAL toward which we all press — we lack unifying MOTIVE.
Lacking motive, a driving, energizing desire to fulfill a purpose, we have no reason for building CHARACTER!
Character is the ability to determine right from wrong, and then to force the self to choose the right. Character, then, demands SACRIFICE of the WRONG.
But most of us aren't even sure what is "right" and what is "wrong" any more. Oh, we may have a fairly good idea, all right, but it's more "chic" and "modern" to give in to the siren song of ultra-liberalism, God-rejecting atheism and modernism, and the pedantic, scholarly disclaimers of creation, their ideas couched in vaguely titillating, scientific and intellectual phraseology which appears to smack of "education."
It has become "fashionable" now to proclaim one's ignorance.
So, lacking a deep and profound belief in our God, and His Commandments, we flounder in a nightmare of disagreement and backbiting, looking worriedly at the hugely dangerous problems in a world armed to its nuclear teeth, nit-picking, griping, complaining, name-calling and protesting — but never seeming to really accomplish anything.
Today, Americans disagree about America.
Millions don't know what America is — and millions cannot agree on what she should be.
During the 60's, Britain worried over its "brain drain." Drastic economic sickness in the British Isles led thousands of promising young professionals — doctors, dentists, scientists, engineers — to seek out other, more rewarding places to practice their skills.
Britain worried, naturally, over this flow of trained skilled professionals, seeing in this "brain drain" a threat to future British security.
But for the past several decades, and especially during the 60's both Britain and America have been experiencing a serious CHARACTER' drain! Yet, neither seems really disturbed by it. It is placed LAST on a list of public concern.
We're losing our capacity for outrage.
We're the new "unshockables." Nothing seems to inspire in us that kind of righteous anger against evil, that indignation against sin, which once seemed a part of our societies.
Today, we tolerate drugs, venereal disease, divorce, premarital and extramarital sex, and illegitimacy. Adultery is not only "tolerated" but openly ADVOCATED, even by members of the clergy.
Our homes disintegrate, and our schools have become chaotic assemblages of confused children, subjected to overcrowded and archaic facilities, an avalanche of purely physiological and fleshly "knowledge" about sex, and ready availability of drugs — even down into the elementary grades.
Only recently, one school board in a major city in Canada banned Ambassador College booklets against crime, drugs, and hippieism from its schools, falsely labeling the booklets "essentially a right-wing diatribe" and "John Birch Society material" which, in every detail, is a grossly hideous distortion and without the slightest basis in fact.