Do Guns Kill People? (continued: Who's to Blame?)

If you read the post on Friday, you know that I was about to reveal who was at fault for the proliferation of violent crime. I apologize for the cliffhanger, but I’ve got to do something to keep you all coming back. Without further ado…

I blame the hippies.

Not what you expected? In some ways I experience guilt pangs when I say that. I love much of what the hippies stood for: their advocacy of peace, their challenges to the government and to social norms, their optimism for a better world. If I was born 40 years earlier I could have been a hippy.

But the hippies brought two things into mainstream American culture which would eventually prove to be the destruction of morality, accountability, and the family structure.

The first of these was the Sexual Revolution. In theory, the Sexual Revolution was a positive thing. It did a great deal of good for feminism and equality. It encouraged dialogue about sexuality, bringing the taboo topic out of the shadows and into the public forum.

On the other hand, the Sexual Revolution made casual sex not just acceptable; it made casual sex the norm. It gave its adherents permission to be irresponsible, unaccountable children. Sex requires a certain level of maturity. It requires love, sacrifice, commitment, or the damage it can do is irreparable. Unfortunately our bodies reach that level of maturity before our minds do.

The Sexual Revolution told us that sex is an expression of our freedom and by repressing our sexual urges we were denying ourselves a beautiful gift that life had given us. Sex is a beautiful gift, but as with all gifts it comes with certain responsibilities.

The result of the Sexual Revolution was that young women were becoming mothers before they were emotionally or mentally prepared to do so. Men, given permission to procreate, embraced their instinctive urges. But when it came time to face the inevitable consequences they lacked the maturity and moral fortitude and often panicked, ran. So we are left with mothers too young to be mothers and fathers that are nowhere to be found.

This trend has continued to this day, and in many ways has been magnified as casual sex becomes more and more accepted, a process which has been helped along by advertising and the media.

The second culture-crusher that the hippies made mainstream was illicit drug use. Of course drugs were around long before the hippies, but the hippies glorified them and made them a cultural norm. They justified drug use by claiming it expanded their minds and spread harmony. In reality, it was escapism at its worst.

It started with pot smoking in the ‘60s and escalated into cocaine snorting in the ‘70s. By the time the ’80s rolled around dealers were realizing that drugs were big business and invented crack, a much more potent and addictive high than its predecessors. The result? As with the Sexual Revolution, it led to the disappearance of fathers and the destruction of the family.

Before I start to sound too much like the “Moral Majority” I want to make a disclaimer: I’m against the “Moral Majority.” Too many of them are bigoted, hateful zealots and I refuse to be associated with them. But when it comes to the importance of family I agree with them wholeheartedly. Family is the only thing that can save American Culture. And I’ll agree with them that it is ideal for a child to grow up with both a mother and a father. These roles meet different needs of a developing child.

The number one factor for the spread of violent crime in American society is absent fathers. The overwhelming majority of violent offenders are young males, and the overwhelming majority of these young males grew up without a father. There was no one there to teach them what it meant to be a man, to teach them about accountability for their actions, responsibility to provide, or respect for their fellow man (/woman). There was no one there to ground them when they hit their sister, to smack them upside the head when they cussed, to be a stable force in their lives that gave them something to aspire to.

So they turned to the only male figures they could find: rappers glorifying violence and gang leaders filling their minds with hate, selfishness, and greed. We are left with young men running amuck. They don’t understand accountability, consequences, or respect. They have never been shown what it means to work and they think they are entitled to whatever they want. So they arm themselves with the means necessary, and they take it. No one ever showed them manhood, so while physically they are men, mentally they are little boys.

While the hippies stuck the wrench in the cog of American culture, introducing elements that would prove the downfall of the family structure, it is up to us to fix it. The hippies are gone and it is essential for us, more specifically fathers, to clean up the mess. So men, before you become fathers consider the consequences of your actions, and prepare to be accountable. Take responsibility for teaching your sons what it means to be a man. And all absent fathers: Grow up, be a man, and be present in your children’s lives.

Thanks for reading.

Note: A quick response to the comments Pat made on the last post. I agree with Pat that it is dangerous for the media to portray violence in any sort of glorifying way, and I don’t intend to let them off the hook. They must take responsibility for the material they are producing and need to understand that, unfortunate as it is, many young men are being influenced by the violent, degrading, immoral images and words they present.

But I don’t think that taking violence out of the media is the answer. Media is a reflection of culture, not its guide. The media takes its cues from what is happening in society and from consumer tastes. The problem is that it’s circular. We are a society that craves violence, so the media gives us violence, which further desensitizes us to violence (I agree with Pat on that, too), so we crave more violence, etc.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” Jiddu Krishnamurti