The Fall of Western Civilization

            Our forefathers witnessed the heady rise of Western Civilization, and now we stand in the midst of the fall.  The symptoms are all around us.  The collapse is happening. Are you willing to look?

            It is said that there were civilizations of the past where a virgin could walk alone and unarmed across an entire continent with a bag of gold strapped at her waist and not fear in the least for her safety.

            My home, the United States, was certainly never that safe, but as a child growing up in the midle of the 20^th Century,  I can say with some pride that I grew up in two small towns – one in Minnesota and one in California – where it was very safe, where I did travel in the ebony of night without the slightest fear for my safety.  And my parents let me so travel (within well-established hours, mind you).   Why?  Because it was safe.  We all knew it was safe.

Could you say that of your town?  I doubt it, even if you live in a gated community.  That’s because the disease has somehow gotten in, through those thick metal bars, into the midst of our most secure and affluent communities, into our very minds.

I can remember a Christmas letter from my cousin some 20 years ago.  He was mayor of a small, 200 year old community in rural New York.  The previous year of his mayorship had witnessed two epic events:  The arrival of McDonalds and the first murder.

If I return to those two towns of my childhood, would I feel safe enough to allow my daughter to walk across town at night alone?  Most certanly not.  I have visited both, and those two small refuges of my childhood have changed.  Some disease has crept into those sleepy places in the last fifty years that has made them unsafe, that has made them feel unsafe, a  disease so pernicious and so pervading that it makes the residents toss and turn in the middle of the night for fear of rape, robbery, and murder.  What has changed?  What is this monster that has crept into our towns and into our lives?

 Come journey with me here in the City of Angels, La Ciudad de Los Angeles, LA to you.   The public schools here look like prisons.  Ten foot high chain link fences encircle them, with barbed wire on the top and no entrance except through well-guarded gaps in the fences and only during school hours.  Are they keeping some monster out – or perhaps are they keeping some monster in?  Either way, the effect is the same.  The children of our fair city, our proud and once beautiful City of Angels, have been reduced to inmates in penal institutions that we call “public schools.”  

Or, to use another metaphor, our children live in a war zone.

It was not like that when I was in school fifty years ago.  There was a low fence around my school to be sure, a three foot fence.  The fence was there to keep the little kids from running out into the street.  Nothing more.  It was not there for security.  No one could ever have mistaken those low fences for security. When I grew into my teens, I used to vault those fences.  No barbed wire on the top, I assure you.  A heroic leap for a young man feeling his oats.

We lived just across the street from that school, and I spent most of my weekends knocking about that campus, just hanging out or riding my bike or playing sports on the grass   Yes, unlike the concrete campuses of L.A., we had real grass! 

Does that place of my childhood sound idyllic to you?  Can you hardly believe that there was a time when women and children were safe to wander the streets of the town after dark?  Can you even imagine open schools with real grass? 

When you hear my story, do you kind of suspect that we were somehow duped, that it really wasn’t that safe, that we only believed it was that safe?   Or if you do believe it (or if like me, you are old enough to remember it), do you think longingly of that time, wishing it could come again but knowing deep in your heart that it can’t, that those times can never come again.

Well, let me quickly say three things about that?  First, it was that safe.  I’m sorry if you doubt it, but it was.   Second, something has indeed changed, something has crept in that has turned our world more sinister, that has turned our bright dreams to a sort of dishwater gray.  Third, that that monster that has crept into our lives has a name, it can be named, it can be isolated as the single cause of the decline of civilization as we know it. 

It isn’t simply age and decrepitude.  Even the new schools in the City of Angels are built like prisons with impenetrable fences around the perimeters.

           And everywhere you turn you see high walls and guarded entrances and the look of fear, lurking just below the surface, just beneath the smiles.

            It isn’t video games, for the decay started long before those were introduced.  It isn’t television, though it may have accelerated the process.  It isn’t violence in the movies, because violence has been a part of our cultural tradition at least since the Greek, Roman, & Norse Myths.

           We are living in the time of the Fall of Rome.  The barbarians are swarming over the borders.  The streets are not safe.  The children have forgotten the faces of their fathers.

           And in case you wonder about it, the same rot that did in Rome is busy doing it to the United States of America.  The same demon that undermined and eventually destroyed that empire is busy destroying the empire of the United States.  Like some demon from a Steven King novel, it goes by a different name, but it is the same.

           I’ve kept you waiting long enough.  It’s time to name the demon.

In this time and place, it goes by the name of “psychology.”