What we have is a dumbing down of America, a fact well documented by many, especially the late Steve Allen (Dumbth: The Lost Art of Thinking, and 101 Ways to Reason Better and Improve Your Mind), illustrates the fact that our nation’s people are, pardon the expression, getting dumber.
Allen (Vulgarians at the Gate) also tells us, in a sense, to wake up and smell the coffee if we are blind to the social chaos now characteristic of American society and the junk yard aspects of much of American entertainment.
We all love our great nation. We boast at being the leader of the civilized world. And yet, the United States leads the world in the percentage of children born out of wedlock. Millions of abortions are performed every year, and most of our leading Catholic politicians continue bleating about “a woman’s right to choose,” in direct and public defiance to the church’s express condemnation of the mindless holocaust of babies in the wombs of their mothers. In my own lifetime I have suffered through the assassinations of some of the best sons our nation has produced, from President John F. Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Senator Robert Francis Kennedy. We have seen Malcolm X gunned down, President Reagan shot, and an attempt made on the life of President Gerald Ford.
Divorce has ripped asunder the American family, and the effect on our youth has been quite destructive. The U.S. leads the world in broken homes, two-fifths of our children no longer with their fathers. Over 15 million children without fathers. A recent report indicated an astonishing 42 percent of children from broken homes have not seen their fathers for over a year.
The point of all this shameful (sinful) behavior is that there is a direct connection between such awful realities on one hand and the constant exposure to television on the other. TV rules supreme, having more influence on our youth than our schools, churches, government, books, or newspapers. Not even parents can compete with the “boob tube”!