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CHAPTER 1
How Good Were the Good Old Days?
Thus says the Lord: "Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, 'We will not walk in it.'"
— JEREMIAH 6:16
AMERICA WAS FAR FROM PERFECT IN THE EARLY 1960S. IN MUCH OF the nation segregation was the law of the land, and women had far fewer opportunities than men, just to mention two of society's inequities. And it's true that the first issue of Playboy, featuring Marilyn Monroe in the nude, was published in 1953. At the same time, there's no denying that 1960s America was a far more innocent, family-friendly country than it is today. And so, fifty-five years ago, when we sat together and watched Leave It to Beaver, we didn't say to ourselves, "How corny! There's not a family in the nation like the Cleavers." Instead, we found what we saw as normal as it was entertaining.
Americans in the late fifties to early sixties enjoyed watching Father Knows Best and The Andy Griffith Show; today we enjoy watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Secret Diary of a Call Girl. In the late fifties to early sixties, Annette Funicello was a popular young female star singing songs like "Pineapple Princess"; today it's Miley Cyrus, singing songs like "Wrecking Ball" — in the nude, riding a wrecking ball, in her music video.
Take an old show like Dennis the Menace, which aired from 1959 to 1963, and think of some of the things he got in trouble for (after all, he was called a "menace," right?). In the first episode, "Dennis successfully eludes a babysitter (whom he has never met) and sneaks out of the house and goes to a cowboy movie that his parents also go to while [his friend] Joey is left with the babysitter, pretending to be Dennis." In the next episode, "Dennis and [his closest friend] Tommy replace a fallen street signpost but fail to notice they've put it up with the street names facing in the wrong direction." Oh, what a menace!
Today we would be following Dennis's journey on reality TV, waiting for him to get out of the juvenile detention center after robbing an elderly man in broad daylight. Will Dennis ever change, or will he end up dead before his eighteenth birthday? And rather than having his old scruffy hairdo with that shock of blond locks always out of place, Dennis would be sporting a purple Mohawk, earrings, an eyebrow ring, a lip ring, and tattoos galore. (If you think I'm exaggerating, watch some clips from Beyond Scared Straight.)
Or consider another early TV series, I Love Lucy, where Lucy and her husband slept in separate beds. Could you imagine today's version, where the show would feature partial nudity (but only partial: after all, it's a family show, so there has to be some modesty), mild profanity, constant sexual innuendos, and kids who show not even the slightest respect to their parents? Or compare Andy Griffith to Stalker or Hannibal, or compare Lawrence Welk to the annual MTV Music Awards. Or watch an old Elvis movie where he shakes his hips — that was so controversial — and compare that to the latest crotch-grabbing, bootie-shaking music video (those have been around for quite some time now). And be sure to compare the lyrics too!
If you're a young person reading this, and you're not familiar with the older shows, take a few minutes to watch some of the episodes. They're readily available on YouTube, and you'll be amazed by what you see. Watch an episode of Lassie, then switch over to American Horror Story, or compare West Side Story to Natural Born Killers. Then go back to The Flintstones cartoon show — remember, we would watch this together as a family — and compare it to today's animated shows like South Park or Adult Swim. (By the way, if you say, "I'd rather pass on watching these newer shows," you won't get an argument from me.)
As Eliot Cohen noted on February 26, 2016:
Ours is an age when young people have become used to getting news, of a sort, from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, when an earlier generation watched Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley. It is the difference between giggling with young, sneering hipsters and listening to serious adults. Go to YouTube and look at old episodes of Profiles in Courage, if you can find them — a wildly successful television series based on the book nominally authored by John F. Kennedy, which celebrated an individual's, often a politician's, courage in standing alone against a crowd, even a crowd with whose politics the audience agreed. The show of comparable popularity today is House of Cards.
Irwin and Debi Unger painted a graphic picture for us of what America looked like on the day of JFK's inauguration, January 20, 1961:
America, on that blustery inauguration day in January 1961, was still deep in the throes of postwar conformity. Skirts were worn below the knee, dresses were tailored, and women's shoes had high heels and pointy toes. On prime-time TV, the favorite programs were The Flintstones, Ozzie and Harriet, One Happy Family, and The Bob Hope Show. In film, the 1961 Academy Award for best picture went to a musical fable about feuding New York gangs, but West Side Story was monumentally innocent despite its subject matter. On Broadway, My Fair Lady was still drawing crowds after 2,300 performances. Elvis had already stirred the rage of parents and moralists with his swiveling hips and suggestive phrasing, but the most popular recording artist in 1961 was Eddie Fisher, the quintessential boy next door. Sexual mores were strict. Illegitimacy was rare in the middle class, and most Americans considered homosexuality a sin, and drove its practitioners deep into the closet. ... On college campuses, except for a sprinkling of the most "progressive" and cosmopolitan ones, fraternities and sororities, pledge week, pep rallies, dances, and "sandbox" politics were the dominant extracurricular activities.
Even though the 1960s were marked by a dramatic cultural shift, things did not change overnight, and so the Academy Award-winning movies of 1964 and 1965 were My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. By 1969 the winner was Midnight Cowboy, a flick as different from the 1964 and 1965 winners as day is from night. Here are some selections from the IMDB Movie Guide describing Midnight Cowboy (taken from a lengthy description of content not fit for children):
The main character makes a living off of prostitution and is constantly denying he's gay.
Different bits of a scene, in which a man and a woman are interrupted in the back seat of a car, appear several times throughout the movie. Clips show the man fully nude from the rear. It is implied that the men interrupting the couple rape both people. We see the woman running naked into the house. In another clip in this montage, a boy is being spanked on his bare bottom.
A man beats an old man a couple of times with punching and slapping leaving the man's face bloody and knocking his dentures out. He shoves the old man onto a bed and shoves a telephone into his mouth. The scene is cut short before we know the outcome, but there is later dialog that implies he was killed.
There are several flashback montages of the attempted rape of both a man and his girlfriend by a group of men.
I'm aware, of course, that a movie like Chariots of Fire won the Best Movie Oscar in 1981 while big hits in 1982 were Gandhi and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. And there are kid-friendly movies that remain super popular to this day. I'm simply pointing out how a culture of relative innocence was quickly replaced by a culture of violence and immorality, and it all happened in a very short period of time. As described by the Ungers, by the end of the sixties, "The Pill, announced with little fanfare in 1960, had ended fear of pregnancy; penicillin had diminished fear of disease. Sex, in any position, in any form, was considered good; denial was bad. The new sexual liberation movement soon spread beyond youthful flower-child dropouts. All through middle-class and working-class America ran a new current of permissiveness."
To highlight the rapidity of these social changes, consider how song titles of the Beatles changed from "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in 1964 to "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" in 1968. And to highlight the longer-term contrast, note that Elvis was singing about his "Blue Suede Shoes" in 1956 while Eminem was rapping about impregnating his own mother in 2000 (in the song "I'm Back").
And how about the many contemporary rap songs calling for the killing of cops or describing parts of women's bodies in the most vulgar terms or celebrating various sexual acts in detail? These lyrics alone point to the massive moral decline in our nation over the period of one generation.
Rev. Jesse Peterson relates, "I grew up listening to people like Diana Ross, James Brown, Otis Redding, the Temptations — the whole Motown lineup, for that matter." He notes that they sang songs with lyrics that talked about couples staying together through thick and thin, like Al Green's "Let's Stay Together." He then writes, "A more typical song today is Kanye West's 'Monster,'" which contains lyrics in which Kanye's mother gives him advice about sexually mounting a woman. Peterson also notes that, "There's even a genre of rap songs that critic Melinda Tankard Reist dubs, 'dead-bitches-are-the-best.'" The times certainly have changed.
Psychology professor David G. Myers gives us a more statistical perspective of the changes that took place between 1960 and 2000. Over that forty-year period, America witnessed:
• Doubled divorce rate
• Tripled teen suicide rate
• Quadrupled rate of reported violent crime
• Quintupled prison population
• Sextupled (no pun intended) percent of babies born to unmarried parents
• Sevenfold increase in cohabitation (a predictor of future divorce)
• Soaring rate of depression — to ten times the pre–World War II level by one estimate
Or consider this one, shocking statistic: "In 1960, only 1 child in every 350 lived with a mother who had never been married! By 2012, 22 out of every 100 kids lived with a single mom, and only half of those moms had ever been married." This is truly staggering.
To put this discussion on a more personal level, my wife, Nancy, was born in 1954, and her mother was married four times. But this situation was extremely rare in that day. Growing up on Long Island (the suburbs of New York City), Nancy knew hardly any other kids whose parents were divorced once, let alone multiple times. I was born a few months later in 1955, and I don't recall a single one of my friends whose parents were divorced. We just didn't hear about it much in that day, and it's not because all of these couples were covering up horrific marriages. Divorce simply wasn't considered an option, and in most cases the marriages were not falling apart.
Of course there were serious problems in many homes, and some couples were anything but happy. But in the days before no-fault divorce, marital vows carried much more weight — couples really did mean "till death do us part," and they worked harder at preserving the marriage — and there had to be valid reasons for the courts to grant a divorce. (There certainly are some valid reasons for divorce.)
Nancy and I grew up during the counterculture revolution of the sixties, and we both got caught up in the spirit of those times with drinking, drugs, and ungodly behavior. Yet neither of us knew anyone who got an abortion then (I recall one girl in my high school who got pregnant and gave up her baby for adoption), and neither of us remember any of our friends either trying to kill themselves or actually killing themselves.
It's different for teenagers today. The vast majority of them know someone who has had an abortion or who has tried to take his or her own life or even succeeded in doing it. As Americans, we have aborted more than fifty-five million babies since 1973. The entire population of Canada is only thirty-five million! As for teen suicide, "among youths 12 to 16 years of age, up to 10% of boys and 20% of girls have considered suicide." And, "suicide is the second leading cause of death — following motor vehicle accidents — among teenagers and young adults." In addition, at least 50 percent of births to first-time mothers in America today are illegitimate. Numerous studies point to the disastrous effects of fatherlessness in the home, as kids raised without a dad make up a disproportionately high percentage of teenagers who have psychological problems, run away from home, commit violent crimes, do not get a good education, and live in poverty. It is a vicious cycle that will only repeat itself until solid families are restored.
But there is something even more striking than the contrast between the America of fifty years ago and the America of today. It is the contrast between America in 1960 and America in the days of our Founding Fathers — or, even more so, in the days of the American colonies. Consider some of the rules of conduct for students at Harvard University (then Harvard College) in the seventeenth century (the school was founded in 1636):
No student of any class, shall visit any shop or tavern, to eat and drink, unless invited by a parent, guardian, stepparent, or some such relative;
No student shall buy, sell or exchange any thing without the approval of his parents, guardians, or tutors;
All students must refrain from wearing rich and showy clothing, nor must any one go out of the college-yard, unless in his gown, coat or cloak;
No one must, under any pretext, be found in the society of any depraved or dissolute person;
If any student shall, either through willfulness or negligence, violate any law of God or of this college, after being twice admonished, he shall suffer severe punishment, at the discretion of the President or his tutor. But in high-handed offences, no such modified forms of punishment need be expected.
Moreover, to graduate from Harvard with the most basic degree in arts (not theology — that came later), the student had to be able "logically to explain the Holy Scriptures, both of the Old and New Testaments ... and ... be blameless in life and character."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Saving a Sick America"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Michael L. Brown.
Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
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