Earlier today, this writer was riding a subway train in New York City to keep a medical appointment. The train stopped at 36th Street to let out and to receive passengers. My mind shifted to memories of a mass subway shooting at that station a year ago where a Frank James set off a smoke bomb and then fired 33 rounds wounding ten people. The doors closed and the train moved on to the next stop, and when the doors opened there, I saw an electronic advertising sign on the platform which I had seen a few weeks before at another subway station. It read: “WE LOVE HEALTHY VAGINAS” and then shifted to another ad. Then, I looked up and studied the advertising that lines subway cars above the windows. I saw a series of posters posted by the City University of New York (CUNY) that told readers that “prestige was available to all.” The signs announced that 75% of students were debt free. Many schools and programs offered free Metrocards (these are cards used to pay subway and bus fares in NYC)) and free textbooks. The incentives for seeking so-called higher education were money and prestige. Nothing about knowledge. Nothing about love of learning. Nothing about making a contribution to society. Nothing about meeting challenges. Nothing about personal growth. Nothing about building a future for oneself and one’s family. The signs were the height of cynicism and degraded values. The mass shooting rejected the Commandment not to murder. Loving vaginas rejects the commandment to love our neighbor (not our neighbor’s vagina) as ourselves. And the ad for the City University encourages covetousness which is repudiated by the tenth of the Ten Commandments.
The above signs of perversity and challenges to the moral order did not begin this year or last year. They did not begin with Pres. Joseph Biden or President Donald Trump or even with Presidents Bush and Obama. Thirty years ago, in the 1990’s a man went into a New York City elementary school as a substitute teacher, and one of the unruly and spastic second graders was standing on a table. When asked by the substitute why he was standing on a table, the 2nd grader replied, “I’m standing here because I want to stand here; I stand wherever I want to stand!!” Another girl in 10th grade in a riotous high school told her teacher, “It’s too warm in here,” and went over to the window and raised it. When the teacher told her that it was against Dept. of Education rules to raise the windows more than six inches, she raised the window even higher…and jumped out. Fortunately, it was a first-floor window, but it was still an eight-to-ten foot drop. These behaviors violate the command to honor thy father and thy mother since in respect of the rules, the schools operate in loco parentis (“in the place of the parents”).
On another occasion, the same teacher opened the door leading to the stairway, and on the other side of the door one of the female students was giving oral sex to a male student. She rapidly released the organ and she and the boy and the two others watching the “operation” ran down the stairs. In the same secondary institution, a girl student was shot in the leg when exiting the school; yet the students were demonstrably upset that the police were “too rough” when they pushed through the crowd to get to the victim so they could rush her to the hospital. At the same high school, long before Colin Kaepernick took a knee, the National Anthem was never sung except at graduation (to the groans of the graduates) as a show for the parents and relatives. The only song of allegiance sung or played was “Lift Up Your Voice and Sing” (the so-called Black National Anthem). The giving of oral sex rejects the Commandment not to commit adultery since “adultery” in a Biblical context means all sexual intimacy outside the bonds of matrimony.
What about those best of all possible decades during the 1980’s Presidency of Ronald Reagan? At that time, an Asst. Vice President in his forties at a major bank boasted to some of his co-workers that on a business trip to Latin America, he went into “dens” where the air was filled thickly with marijuana smoke and gorgeous chicks in their twenties were everywhere. Another lady banker boasted about s******g clients in the back seat of limousines. On business trips to enhance their employer’s assets and enhance their incomes, they instead used their business connections as opportunities for adultery.
In the 1980’s a brilliant Harvard student joined a cult that was allowed to hold its meetings in a Roman Catholic church in New York City. The cult combined Hindu teachings and meditation with Roman Catholicism and with the teachings of the cult leader who was based in New Mexico. The Harvard student, despite an off-the-charts high IQ, was captivated by the cult and gave half his inheritance and a huge percent of his earnings from two jobs worked seven days a week to the cult. He believed in a global spirituality not unlike the twisted globalism of today in the socio-political realm or the so-called “ecumenicalism” of the present Pontiff and other cosmopolitan types in the world of religion and/or politics. He “knew” [sic] that Reagan nationalism was generations behind the times and that Western or U.S. hegemony was senseless spiritually as well as politically. This brilliant student rejected the first and greatest commandment, namely you shall have no other gods before me.
In the 1970’s a young soldier returning from Vietnam disembarked from the plane only to be confronted by a young woman calling him a murderer and a racist who killed Vietnamese people who only wanted self-government. He punched her in the face and left her screaming, crying, and cursing on the ground. The out-of-control street rage of the sixties over civil rights and the “right” to take psychedelic drugs like LSD and against the Vietnam war became a rallying cry for a large number of people in their twenties and early thirties. Those who opposed the war and thought that all hostility against their fellow citizens was justified in that cause violated the divine command to love our neighbors as ourselves.
The Chicago Eight (1968) disrupted the Democrat National Convention held in Chicago. One of those eight, Abbie (Revolution for the Hell Of It) Hoffman, instigated law breaking and trouble wherever he could, and could be heard laughing demonically as he scattered dollars over the New York Stock Exchange. That group of cowardly, anti-social troublemakers were among anti-war types who began to call police “the pigs.” Yes, scorn for police began in the sixties. Hoffman and his mocking cohorts portrayed their anti-social/criminal behavior such as committing adultery, selling drugs, instigating riots, and stealing as justifiable. Abbie Hoffman, an egomaniacal dope who also sold dope, even wrote a book entitled Steal This Book!
Young males started growing shoulder length hair – looking increasingly like women decades before transsexualism became an exciting social movement. It was a time of libertinism and an all-out attack on middle class values and on Judeo-Christian morality. Every single one of the Ten Commandments came under all-out attack, and the perverse behaviors and attitudes we see today are a continuation and expansion of the lewd and ignorant rage that beset our country in the sixties.
The children of middle-class parents openly mocked their parents, went nude or semi-nude in public, took drugs and “dropped out.” Today we still see a hyper-informality in dress in the USA that is a direct result of the grunge-look of the sixties and seventies. Therefore, that entire counter-culture or hippie movement was a rejection of the commandment to honor your father and your mother. These drugged up anti-social young people from decent homes stopped going to church, substituted faith in psychedelic experiences for faith in Almighty God, believed in free love, made excuses for stealing from stores when they were broke because they did not work, and lied regularly in their criticisms of American society. We are still feeling the effects of that rebellion to this day. How many people today can even say what five of the Ten Commandments are?
The sixties were a time when churches started setting up coffee shops and playing guitar music in order to be “contemporary” and placate the radicalized youth. Instead of calling for repentance and bowing down before a holy God, a tone of wishy-washy “harmonizing of interests” between churches and the counter-culture was instituted. This “harmonizing of interests” was then, and still is, a capitulation to demons and to anti-social trends..
The love of pleasure and undue love of self has spun much of our culture on a path of neurosis or even psychosis. Add in the essential element of sin that theologians and true followers of Jesus Christ would note, and we have a complete understanding of the sixty plus years of ever-enlarging perverse behavior in our society.
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Jeffrey Ludwig
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