As a world community, are experiencing increasing violations to our collective belief systems. The iconoclasts are running rampant. Violations of long respected social codes, values, mores are everyday occurances. Nothing is sacred, Nothing and no one is above derision. Hatred, extremes of verbal abuse, hideous senseless acts of violence abound. Indeed they are often applauded or subtly sanctioned. These acts are becoming so commonplace, we stopped defining these behavioral extremes as aberrant outliers. They happen every day. We’re getting immune to them. People who just a few years ago defined themselves as mainstream Americans have gone off the deep end. They put up with things they would never have put up with before. They tolerate even encourage abusive obnoxious language and laugh or clap, or stand up and cheer for it. Corrosive, toxic words and ideas are spewed, hateful, crazy actions occur and instead of people being appalled they applaud.
Through war after war, treaty after treaty, court ruling after court ruling, we as a global collective have worked incrementally to amass a broadly accepted set of social standards. Society has strived to achieve as ordinary, a reasonable standard of conduct, fair rules of social engagement, political correctness, respectful problem solving, restrained discourse, humanitarianism, cohesive cooperative government, environmental responsibility. In this country we’ve strived to achieve Equality under the Law, a Fair and Just Court System, Civil Rights for all Citizens…we’re not there yet but we have improved. We keep trying. Through generations civilization has assembled generally accepted social guidelines that strive to provide safety, maintain order and regulate themselves in accordance with some semblance of reasonableness.
We teach our toddlers to ‘use their words’ rather than hitting or spitting. We try to socialize, raise and train our children to be responsible and respectful, to be polite and considerate even if they disagree or play on opposite teams. Now, it seems without our knowledge, agreement or approval those social guidelines we struggled and died to achieve are being trampled.