
 |
|
February 10, 2012
Lisa M. Krieger: Man with defibrillator demands access to his own heart's information
David G. Savage: Why activists may not be in a hurry to have High Court rule on alternative marriage
February 9, 2012
Laura McMullen: 10 Least Expensive Public Schools for Out-of-State Students
Kimberly Palmer: How to actually enjoy -- relaxing, financially -- your vacation
February 8, 2012
Warren Richey: Why momentous Prop. 8 ruling might not satisfy gay-rights groups
Menachem Wecker: Though Controversial, LL.M.'s Can Lead to Specialized Legal Jobs
The Kosher Gourmet byDana Velden: Going to the bother of making soup? You know it better be good. This CREAM OF TOMATO SOUP certainly is! And it's a cinch to make, too (Includes techinques and serving secrets)
February 7, 2012
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Caught off-guard? President's Super Bowl interview with Matt Lauer gives those who need a reason not to vote for him, a darn good one
Suzanne Bohan: Leaping lizards! Tiny reptiles advancing robot design
February 6, 2012
Jonathan Tobin: Iran Threatens Israel With Destruction, But the New York Times Doesn't Hear It
Jeffrey Fleishman: In newly democratic Egypt, tens of democracy activists jailed, to stand trial; their groups are 'threatening the stability of the homeland'
Julie Deardorff : Researchers say antioxidants may not be that effective and could do more harm than good
Mark Clayton: How did Anonymous hackers eavesdrop on FBI and Scotland Yard?
February 3, 2012
Edmund Sanders : Israeli official says Iran is creating missile that could reach East Coast of US
Victoria Kim: Immigrant-smuggling ring used black drivers to avoid racial profiling
February 2, 2012
Jim Carney: Wrong number call may have saved her life
Reza Kahlili : Ex-CIA spy in Iran's Revolutionary Guard: What Obama doesn't grasp about striking deals with Tehran
Tina Susman: For woodchuck rescuer, every day is Groundhog Day
February 1, 2012
Brian Bennett: US officials see increasing threat of domestic attack from Iran
Emily Brandon: How to Take Advantage of New 401(k) Fee Disclosures
January 31, 2012
January 30, 2012
Paul Richter and Ramin Mostaghim: Misreading Teheran's limits -- deadly and economically devastating as they may be -- is a risk administration, Europe seem willing to take
Suzanne Bohan: Warning: Nap-deprived tots missing more than sleep, study finds
Meg Handley: Banks Revamping Rewards Programs to Woo Customers
January 27, 2012
Caroline B. Glick: Obama: Of course I intend to prevent a nuclear holocaust . . . in a few months
Yochonon Donn: In liberal New York City, fervently-Orthodox Jews may soon be getting a district to call their own
Jeannine Stein: An inflated ego and thinking you're 'all that' doesn't just make others sick of you, it can make you ill
Katy Hopkins: New budget rules may affect how much money you get for college
January 26, 2012
Ed Koch: To the New York Times, calling for the murder of Jews by those capable of having their incitement taken seriously isn't news
Jeannine Stein: Mental illness struck one in five U.S. adults in 2010: Report
January 25, 2012
Richard Simon: House passes two bills endorsing the use of religious symbols at military memorials
Fred Weir: Putin: Multiethnic Russia cannot survive as a US-style 'melting pot'; must find its own way
Susan Johnston: 5 Sneaky Coupon Strategies Consumers Should Watch Out For
January 24, 2012
Carol Clark: The price of your soul: How your brain decides whether to 'sell out'
Caroline B. Glick: America lost most in 'Arab Spring'. Sadly, many voters still don't grasp the extent
Warren Richey: Drug criminal scores win in GPS ruling from conservative-leaning high court
Erika Bolstad: Black conservatives gather to talk about gaining strength
January 23, 2012
Melissa Dribben: Jewish voters to play a key role in Florida's Republican primary
Jordan Rau: In quest to grow, Catholic hospital system will announce this morning its break from church
Ali Safi: U.S. envoy gives Taliban terms for peace talks
January 19, 2012
January 18, 2012
January 17, 2012
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: No-kidding red lines: U.S. response to an Iranian nuke may be bluster, but Israel's won't be
David G. Savage: They sued their principals after slandering them online --- now the cases are headed to the Supreme Court
David Francis: Where to Invest in 2012: With stocks expected to rebound, opportunity abounds for investors
January 13, 2012
Ben Lynfield: Israeli lawmakers move to annex Jewish Judea, one museum at a time
Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz: Thriving through touch: Gentle massage helps older people with low mobility improve in mind and body
January 12, 2012
Warren Richey: Landmark Supreme Court ruling a 'resounding win' for religious groups
Warren Richey: Supreme Court says no to new rule on eyewitness testimony
John Fauber : Statins found to raise diabetes risk in postmenopausal women
Katy Hopkins : Consider This Before You Pay for an Online Degree
The Kosher Gourmet by Joseph Erdos: This mushroom and barley soup has an intense -- almost nutty -- flavor that mixes robust with Middle East. It has creaminess without cream
January 11, 2012
Shari Roan: Millions of atrial fibrillation sufferers at risk for devastating, but preventable, stroke
Tom Hussain: Pakistan -- recipient of more than $21 billion in civilian and military aid -- speeds pursuit of Iranian pipeline, defying US
David G. Savage: High court signals it won't be loosening TV's 'indecency' rules
Stephen Ceasar: Oklahoma's Islamic law amendment can't go into effect, court rules
January 10, 2012
Reza Kahlili: From an ex-CIA spy: US must exploit new split in Iran's Revolutionary Guard
Karen Kaplan: Study: Nicotine replacement products ineffective when used in real-life situations
January 9, 2012
Michael Doyle: Put through legal hell over dream home, couple fought back hard --- all the way to Supreme Court
|
| |
Jewish World Review
Oct. 3, 2007
/ 21 Tishrei 5768
Not even our parks are safe … And I lay at least part of the blame on the cultural revolution and our obsession with the individual
By
Rod Dreher
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Earlier this year, UNICEF reported that British children are the unhappiest in the industrialized world. In response, 270 academics, writers and child-development professionals signed a statement saying that aspects of modern life itself makes it hard for children simply to play. The list includes:
The ready availability of sedentary, sometimes addictive screen-based entertainment; the aggressive marketing of over-elaborate, commercialized toys (which seem to inhibit, rather than stimulate, creative play); parental anxiety about "stranger danger," meaning children are increasingly kept indoors; a test-driven school and preschool curriculum in which formal learning has substantially replaced free, unstructured play; and a more pervasive cultural anxiety which ... contaminates the space needed for authentic play to flourish.
Well, we don't watch much TV at our house. We forbid video games and don't let the kids spend much time on the computer. Relatives agreed not to give our young children expensive electronic toys for birthday or Christmas gifts. We have our school-age son in a school that doesn't put students at the mercy of constant assessment testing.
But parental and cultural anxiety? Oh, man, where to begin?
My wife and I live in a decent East Dallas neighborhood, and there's a playground right around the corner. But the day will never come when we let our kids go play there alone. In fact, the day will never come when we give them permission to play unsupervised on our front lawn.
Why not? For one thing, there are halfway houses for sex offenders in the general area, unsavory relics from our gentrified neighborhood's slum past. For another, stray dogs run loose. Sometimes we'll see dodgy older teenagers from someplace else walking the streets. And most of the people in our neighborhood are strangers to us.
And if we lived in a gated community in a well-off suburb, I would feel no different. A friend tells me about letting her young son go to a playmate's home. My friend discovered when her little boy came home that he'd seen an R-rated movie there, thanks to the playmate's older brother. "You just never know where it's going to come from nowadays," she said with a sigh.
This is not how I grew up in my small southern Louisiana town in the 1970s. It was far from paradise, but people knew each other, and they knew the rules. That is, community standards were broadly shared and enforced. My mom could be sure that other moms in town would be her proxy and we kids knew that, too. There was safety and comfort in that. It was a good way to grow up.
That same sense of close-knit social relations felt suffocating to me as a teenager, though. I couldn't wait to leave town and follow my dreams. And so I did, going farther than my parents ever allowed themselves to imagine. Since I left home at 16, the longest I've lived at the same address was four years. Freedom and opportunity have made me a happy man.
Now, they have made me an anxious dad. The same cultural revolution that made my escape from the perceived confines of my small town possible and enabled me to pursue my career and personal interests around the country has helped make it impossible to let my children go unsupervised to the neighborhood playground.
What's the connection? Alan Ehrenhalt explains it in his 1995 book, The Lost City. It's about growing up in Chicago in the 1950s and the world of strong, safe neighborhoods that we've lost in the last four or five decades. Mr. Ehrenhalt, certainly no nostalgist, points out that all the good things people miss about the era most of all, a sense of community cannot be separated from the cultural conformity, lack of mobility and dearth of individual choice that contemporary Americans would find unacceptable.
Since the 1960s, American culture has been organized in an unprecedented way around the sovereign individual and expanding choices to meet his desires. Liberals and conservatives buy into this model. Though they would draw lines in different places liberals tend to exalt choice in sexual and familial relations; conservatives are keener on choice in economic matters most Americans today have a basic philosophical stance that Mr. Ehrenhalt calls "the belief in individual choice and suspicion of any authority that might interfere with it."
When looking out for No. 1 becomes the basic social value for individuals, as well as corporations, traditional community becomes far more difficult to sustain. A community in the older understanding is far more than a group of people who happen to live in the same neighborhood. In traditional community, the shared moral sense of its members is embodied, enforced and passed on through institutions, customs and personal loyalties. This is unquestionably hard on rebels, outsiders and other individualists and post-'60s American popular culture privileges the dissenters' stories.
Without that social authority, though, the everyday communal trust taken for granted two generations ago collapses. We are today living in the ruins and don't know how to get back what we've lost. Mr. Ehrenhalt's inconvenient truth: "There is no easy way to have an orderly world without somebody making the rules by which order is preserved. Every dream we have about re-creating community in the absence of authority will turn out to be a dream in the end."
A culture that exalts the individual and his tastes and renounces any binding authority undoes itself. We contemporary Americans all want to get to the heaven of a safe, wholesome and orderly world for our children to grow up in, but none of us want to die to ourselves to achieve it.
Given the economic structures and social habits of modernity, it's difficult to know if even those willing and eager to make personal sacrifices to gain real community could find a realistic opportunity to do so.
My friend Tom Kelly has lived in Washington all of his long life. During his Depression-era boyhood, families would escape the heat by sleeping under the stars in the public parks, everyone together, happy as clams. Can you imagine?
And here we are, wealthy and free beyond anything our grandparents could have conceived, but afraid to let our children go to the park on their own. How rich we have become, and how very poor.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
| BUY THE BOOK |
| Click HERE to purchase it at a discount. (Sales help fund JWR.). |
|
Comment by clicking here.
Rod Dreher is assistant editorial page editor of the Dallas Morning News and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum).
PREVIOUSLY
08/22/07: The Decalogue, dangerous? Advice for a society that cringes at commandments
08/15/07: Playing the anti-science card
08/01/07: How the U.S. can avoid its own version of the fall of the Roman empire
07/24/07: Conservative author: Big business can be as dangerous a threat as big government
07/09/07: All quiet but the doleful pleas of a father who knows
06/28/07: When we let conspiracy theory masquerade as news, we fall prey to much more than deception
06/20/07: Stranded on Delta: They may love to fly, but it certainly doesn't show
06/13/07: When did conservatism start to mean never having to say you're sorry?
05/08/07: PBS darling gets abused by PC police
05/02/07: Impervious to beauty and deadened to depravity
04/20/07: What I know about being a loner
10/28/05: How the conservatives crumble
© 2007, The Dallas Morning News,
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
|
|

Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Jay Ambrose
Michael Barone
Barrywood
Tony Blankley
Lori Borgman
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Richard Z. Chesnoff
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Alan Douglas
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
Frank J. Gaffney
Bernie Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Argus Hamilton
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Ron Hart
Nat Hentoff
Marybeth Hicks
David Horowitz
Jeff Jacoby
Renee James
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ed Koch
Ch. Krauthammer
Michael Ledeen
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Ann McFeatters
Dale McFeatters
Dana Milbank
Jeanne Moos
Dick Morris
Jim Mullen
Deroy Murdock
Judge A. Napolitano
Bill O'Reilly
Kathleen Parker
Star Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Sharon Randall
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Heather Robinson
Pat Sajak
Debra J. Saunders
Martin Schram
Culture Shlock
David Shribman
Roger Simon
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Ben Stein
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Dan Thomasson
Bob Tyrrell
Ben Wattenberg
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
ZeitGeist
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
Lisa Benson
John Branch
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Glenn Foden
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holbert
Lee Judge
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Jimmy Margulies
Rick McKee
Michael Ramirez
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Ed Stein
Danna Summers
John Trever
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters

Mr. Know-It-All
Dr. Peter Gott
GET A JOB! by Marty Nemko
Richard Lederer
Frugal Living
Tech Maven
On Nutrition
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
|