My hypothesis is that following the victory of the North in the Civil War, the successes of the progressive movement in the early 20th century in education and sanitation, the pivotal involvement of the United States in WWI and WWII, the civil rights movement and subsequent legislation, and the successful NASA program we have seen several generations that worship a vision or ideal of America that has never existed and thus continue to rail against any perceived injustice or deficiency in our great society. Those of us privileged enough to have known people born before the ideal became ingrained (I knew my great grandmother born in 1882) were exposed to much more realistic people.
We did incredible things and continue to do so, but the idea that we are doing anything more than trying to achieve the best government with the least restrictions on our citizens is foreign to our earlier ideals and what we hold onto as the law of the land. This notion that we are to set upon the world and morally reform it, militarily dominate it, and do the same to all pockets in our own land is a notion not backed by our laws or founding documents, and not palatable to the people that elected Trump.
For sports journalism to have social justice and athletics on basically equal footing is a good example of how I and many other see this whole ideal going too far. We all know human nature as we live fighting it, and the hardest task in all of our lives is to overcome laziness, anger, hate, greed, etc.. Constant moralizing and holding everyone and our nation to some standard humans have never proved capable of achieving is a weird game. It is interesting that we like to teach our children values of societal virtue as defined by those in control of the dialogue now rather than the personal virtues (self denial, hard work, generosity, manners) that if all adopted would actually lead to societal virtue. If men behaved as gentlemen, as they were once instructed to be, there would not be a me too movement. This whole thing circles on itself. "We want liberation from your petty morals." "Fire all horny men they are not moral towards women." I could go on but hopefully you get my idea.
We did incredible things and continue to do so, but the idea that we are doing anything more than trying to achieve the best government with the least restrictions on our citizens is foreign to our earlier ideals and what we hold onto as the law of the land. This notion that we are to set upon the world and morally reform it, militarily dominate it, and do the same to all pockets in our own land is a notion not backed by our laws or founding documents, and not palatable to the people that elected Trump.
For sports journalism to have social justice and athletics on basically equal footing is a good example of how I and many other see this whole ideal going too far. We all know human nature as we live fighting it, and the hardest task in all of our lives is to overcome laziness, anger, hate, greed, etc.. Constant moralizing and holding everyone and our nation to some standard humans have never proved capable of achieving is a weird game. It is interesting that we like to teach our children values of societal virtue as defined by those in control of the dialogue now rather than the personal virtues (self denial, hard work, generosity, manners) that if all adopted would actually lead to societal virtue. If men behaved as gentlemen, as they were once instructed to be, there would not be a me too movement. This whole thing circles on itself. "We want liberation from your petty morals." "Fire all horny men they are not moral towards women." I could go on but hopefully you get my idea.
