Everything you ever believed in, every rule you thought valid, every law of Nature you considered indisputable, is going on the chopping block.  Behold, this is the Age of Confusion.

Most of us were raised in Italian families that accepted the values and traditions handed down to us.  We connected hard work with success, frugality with wealth, family with responsibility, and debt with obligation.   These traits weren’t uniquely Italian, they were the guiding principles of many other ethnic and racial groups.  Nations are built on these traits.  The stronger the family values the stronger the nation.  In fact, the Romans often recognized how family “piety” (pietas) – respectful and faithful attachment to the gods, country, parents and relatives – was the foundation of their society.  They even minted coins with that message.

The America that also embraced these values is veering away from them before our eyes.  Whole segments of the population no longer accept the nuclear family as the building block of society.  “It takes a village” to raise good children not a mother and father, we are told by a former First Lady.   Success can now be achieved through racial quotas and pandering politicians rather than sweat equity.  Wealth can arrive in the mail as government hand-outs, lawsuit settlements, or reparations.  Student debt is a tool of oppression, not a personal obligation.  Borders and citizenship are fascistic ways to limit human rights.  Voter ID requirements destroy democracy.  Classifying people as male or female is so 20th Century!

The wonderful part of all this confusion is that it has no negative consequences.  Thousands of years of human civilization, hundreds of years of European and American societal development had no connection to stability and progress.  Look around:  the trains run on time, food is everywhere, jobs are plentiful, we have electricity, air conditioning, airplanes, televisions, computers, absolutely everything.  Those things didn’t need nuclear families, merit-based education, a Greco-Roman foundation, capitalism, courageous explorers, or Western inventors.  Columbus could have been African; Thomas Edison could have been Chinese, the Roman Empire could have been run by Muslims.  Bottom line: be not afraid to change anything!  It will all work out in the end, and there will be no more poverty, discrimination, or climate change.

Sounds ridiculous, but too many people believe that the modern world came along by accident.  They believe that traits like punctuality, hard work, self-reliance, and delayed gratification are White values that hinder the equality of minorities.  (In 2020, The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture removed a “Whiteness” graphic that claimed this very thing.)  They seem to forget that East and South Asian-Americans have achieved remarkable success based on those same traits.

Dare I say it?  The younger generations take so much for granted that many no longer want to commute to work, to leave their couch to vote, to marry, to own property, to join the military, to pay their debts, to raise children with two parents, to acknowledge the pitfalls of socialism.  Everything that came before them was “oppression.”  Injustice still surrounds them.  They blame society but not their own misjudgment or academia for their student debt.  They blame landlords for high rents but don’t consider the effects of millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, flooding the housing market.  They think “family wealth” was only achieved by ‘White privilege’ without a thought about how “baby daddies” are destroying any chance of ghetto families accumulating wealth. 

When society becomes accustomed to deficit spending, baby daddies, debt default, labeling everything an injustice or White privilege, racial quotas to achieve “equity,” and government bail-outs, the harder it will be to restore the old values that keep society going. Free rides and bad examples have a way of undermining the spirit of a stable society. The Romans called it “bread & circuses,” giving the idle populace free food and entertainment. Today, government continues the practice, aided and abetted by a media that makes anarchy look like ‘democracy’ and traditional values like oppression.

It didn’t end well for the Romans, even with a free bath. -JLM