Vulgar, Ignorant & Impatient

Decline has no past. It always moves forward.

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It isn’t fair to characterize the young of the current world as dismissively as I have in this title. They’re not all vulgar, ignorant, and impatient. Just an ever-increasing number of them. It’s not so much the young, as it is generations of the young. Something went wrong.

It’s only gotten worse.

Vulgar speech has come to be thought, cool, more real, and more sophisticated, than civilized speech. Civilized speech is widely considered pretentious.

Ignorance plays a role in the pitifully popular substitution of !@#$%^&* for real words. Young people hear that sort of language everywhere; they think it’s normal. The schools never taught them better - neither did their parents.

It’s been several generations since parents knew better.

That’s not the fault of either parents or the young. It’s the fault of the wider culture which has been enthusiastically working its way back to barbarism since the 1960 era’s promotion of the slogan, “Never trust anyone over 30”.

Stupid is good at reproducing itself.

Before the 1960’s, children were expected to learn from those who had gone before them. After the 1960’s children were encouraged to, “Do your own thing”. Why bother to learn from the past when you were taught to have no respect for the past.

Generations of disrespect for the past has also resulted in forgetful memory of the 60’s culture which began the decline.

Decline has no past. It always moves forward.

I was in my young 20’s during the 60’s.

I fell for the pied-piper delusions of those days, along with so many others who were still in their ‘teens. I didn’t fall quite as hard as they did because I was born in the 40’s, and educated in the 1950’s. Strangely, the few years between the fifties’ and the sixties’ seemed more like a generation.

The change in attitude and interest actually was, generational.

I noticed the difference but barely paid it attention. It was a time of sex and drugs and rock n’ roll. Those distracting diversions diverted my attention to the break in culture that was happening all around me. Not that I could have done anything about it, anyway.

So, here we are in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, where hype is more important than reflection. Where progress is more important than doing something worth doing. Where style is more important than substance.

Who knows where the !@#$%^&* time goes. Who cares. I gotta go!

By K. L. Shipley

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