Emphasis on the baby part of the Baby-Boomer college anarchists has given us a self-centered and infantile nation that has fallen into social and political disrepair. The only question is how far down the road to hell we have fallen, and whether we can regain solid ground.
Kay Hymowitz’s recent article in City Journal paints a dispiriting picture of America’s young men as hedonistic, selfish loners unwilling to assume the commitment and responsibility of marriage and raising children.
Quote:
Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children...Single Young Males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it’s receding.
Maggie’s Farm points us to a less pessimistic assessment on ShrinkWrapped
Whatever the extent of social infantilism (defined as unwillingness or inability to deal with life on the level of adult responsibility), there is no denying that the phenomenon exists.
The Baby Boomer generation have manifestly different conceptions of their roles and responsibilities than did their parents or grandparents as recently as the 1950s. And the conceptions of the 1950s were those upon which our nation grew and prospered during the preceding 345 years.
Since the late 1960s we have witnessed the greatest surge in history of illegitimate births and single-parent families, along with acceptance of divorce as the norm.
Timing of the change in paradigm can be fixed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, coincident with the riots and classroom sit-ins at our colleges and universities. Those were the years when callow youth declared that traditions of Western civilization were irrelevant. Those students, exemplified by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and their criminally violent offshoot Weatherman, declared that they knew better than their teachers what they needed to know and demanded conversion of colleges and universities into socialistic indoctrination madrassas.
The coincidental feminist movement presented the paradigm of women who didn’t need men and saw marriage as an impediment to self-fullfilment. With it came the apotheosis of sexual promiscuity as the ultimate purpose of society.
Young men’s avoidance of commitment and disintegration of traditional families was not far behind. With feminists seeming to encourage it, “love ‘em and leave ‘em” became acceptable conduct.
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