Privileged And Prosperous
By Margaret Snyder (06/08/04)
Washington Post columnist David Broder finally said something a few months ago that I can agree with. He said, and attributed it to John Edwards, erstwhile Democratic candidate for President, that we have become “two nations, with the privileged and prosperous on one side and the struggling majority of families on the other.”
For years David Broder has wailed his lament of “Can´t we all just get along?” Here at last he has hit upon a concept liberals and conservatives can both embrace. Problem is, of course, that while liberals and conservatives may agree with these words, we interpret them a little differently.
We all know what David Broder meant, but whom do conservatives mean by the “privileged and prosperous”? Those would include, among others, the moneyed and influential members of the entertainment and news media. The wealthy actors and actresses, the Michael Moores, the Ted Turners, the Larry Flynts.
What about the “struggling majority of families”? Who are they and how are they struggling? They are regular folks, parents struggling to raise their children to be good people, God-fearing people, useful citizens. We feel like we are trying to raise our children in a cesspool. The privileged and prosperous are creating filth and discharging it into the zeitgeist.
They mock the most deeply held beliefs of the rest of us. They fill the airwaves and the cable programming and the newspapers and magazines and the movie theaters with celebrations of amorality and hedonism. Sexual mores are consciously undermined. Movies and TV sit-coms and drama series mock traditional notions of morality. For some thirty years, children and young people have been exposed to a steady diet of amorality, wherein all the sympathetic characters, which is to say the ones young people want to emulate, subscribe to the “new morality”, which is to say no morality.
And when we complain about the cultural pollution, we are told it is up to us to be responsible parents. What are we supposed to do? Tell our children not to breathe?
Yes, the majority of families are struggling. They are struggling to find some affirmation of their values in the larger culture so that their children’s souls are not lost by the time they are old enough to vote. But the privileged and prosperous affirm only their right to “artistic expression” and “freedom of speech” so that they can peddle their garbage in our faces, as if the first amendment had been written to protect the rights of pornographers. Their freedom is untempered by responsibility.
No, it is even worse: they feel a duty to disabuse young people of the values taught them by their struggling parents. The privileged and prosperous stand opposed to traditional morality and consider it the source of evil. Instead, the privileged and prosperous seek happiness in self-indulgence; the idea of seeking happiness in virtue is foreign to them.
The privileged and prosperous are the spiritual heirs of those philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Rousseau to Nietzsche, who looked upon western civilization—the civilization of the Greeks, the Hebrews and the Romans—and found it imperfect. No civilization is perfect. But these people believed that the solution was to destroy western civilization and replace it with…well, surely something better would come along.
No, nothing better has come along. For about two hundred years now, since the French Revolution, forces now embodied in the privileged and prosperous have been attempting to destroy western civilization. As we look around, sometimes it seems that they are just about finished.
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