I agree with him, for the most part.Cpl Kendall wrote:Ahh yes, Glenn Beck. The guy that agrees with Osama, here's a quote from one of his radio programs:
Great guy, real moderate. I'd hate to see what's classified as a liberal in the US by this example of moderation.BECK: You know, there`s a new poll out that Muslims, the higher educated Muslims in the Middle East are more likely to be extremists? More and more Muslims now hate us all across the world, and it really has not a lot to do with anything other than our morals.
The things that they were saying about us were true. Our morals are just out the window. We`re a society on the verge of moral collapse. And our promiscuity is off the charts.
Now I don`t think that we should fly airplanes into buildings or behead people because of it, but that's the prevailing feeling of Muslims in the Middle East. And you know what? They`re right.
On the one hand, I see certain benefits in a Brave-New-World-esque open season on assorted sexcapades in as many and as varied combinations as one wants, and I firmly believe that consenting adults can and should be able to do as they wish. The excessive number of notches in my proverbial belt are proof enough of that.
But, I also see how such things are incompatible with more traditional relationships, and those relationships have certain benefits that can outweigh the rest. But being long-term, our increasingly short-term-thinking society frequently misses them.
Right now, these two concepts are largely at odds. And there are many people who find themselves caught in the middle. They want to "have fun" but also want to "settle down".
This results in some problems.
For one thing, having the skills to achieve a new "hook-up" every other weekend has certain advantages at times. But frankly, it can get really old. You do the same old moves and score and there's no challenge, no depth, no intrigue, no mystery. You lose the thrill of the chase.
But more importantly, doing that sort of thing all the time can start to mess you up in regards to long-term relationships. After all, if you're accustomed to discarding people for any ole reason because you know you can have a new one the following weekend, it becomes far too easy to do so even in a longer-term relationship. "The new" is always available, so that need to invest in "the old" isn't as strongly there as it might otherwise be.
Think about it . . . back in the day, people got married and that was pretty much that. Divorce was a dirty word. And while that sort of thing could lead to some problems, too, there was also the more obvious necessity of working through relationship problems.
A related problem is honesty. In a brave new world, the consenting adults would be open with each other enough to give that informed consent option. But that's not happening much these days. A guy might tell a girl he's single (meaning "unmarried" in his mind), and might be trying to keep her around because she's a good girl, but he still wants to keep hooking up with these other two girls and is always open to random hook-ups. But, afraid the good girl won't stick around if she's aware of such things, he doesn't tell her about any of that. So their relationship is based on lies.
To his mind, the hook-ups are meaningless sex. The relationship with the good girl may have some meaning to him, but clearly not as much as it would have to her. And while the other relationships are meaningless to him, they would mean a great deal to her were she aware.
And really, having gotten used to having other hook-ups while in the relationship with the good girl, is there really any cause to suspect that he's going to ever stop? Even if there are rings exchanged, the mentality will remain.
And what of the reverse? Birth control is not absolutely perfect, after all, and tales abound of men discovering that they're not the actual father and so on. Do we really need that?
There's no real deterrence anymore. Ethics aren't taught except in specialized ways to college students in certain fields, and the old moral education from churches is overwhelmed by society. Religion's a crutch, but was useful in that regard. Now we get our morality from TV and movies, which isn't healthy.
Our increasingly anonymous society features no stigma. And there's nothing to be found in the law . . . it's not like any of these activities have any real penalty associated with them.
The main point here is that traditionalism and the way things are now are in a state of conflict, and there are casualties. There are ways to potentially improve the situation so that both co-exist more easily, but right now it's all too easy for a traditionalist to correctly assert that society's going into the shitter, and even for many non-traditionalists to agree.
Is it any wonder that very-traditionalist outsiders would concur?
