About 6 years ago a class discussion with my college students regarding a writing assignment slipped into a discussion of what was “normal” and what was not. I expected a roomful of students with a variety of life experiences and values would be able to have a thoughtful and enlightening conversation about this challenging topic, but this was not what happened.

What I witnessed was a degree of resolute self-censorship that I found startling. It was roundly agreed at the outset that any attempt to define normalcy was inherently oppressive and demeaning, so no further discussion was necessary. I tried to throw out a few provocative questions to jumpstart a dialogue—Are murderers normal? Are drug addictions normal? Is animal cruelty normal?—and I was able to obtain some general agreement that certain extreme behaviors might be considered abnormal. 

However, once we pulled back from the ragged fringe of violent and self-destructive pathologies, it was made very clear that expressing any opinion regarding the morals and behavior of others was the most thoroughly uncool thing one could possibly do. End of topic.

One could argue (and a great many would) that the non-attitudes expressed by my students were the very pinnacle of enlightened tolerance, but an equally persuasive explanation might be that this was evidence of critical thinking skills that had atrophied from disuse.

However, it is perhaps the case that the most compelling analysis of the extraordinary flabbiness of our country’s moral fiber is both simple and depressing: Many people today consider being held to any standard whatsoever a real drag.

We see a decline of standards of behavior and morality wherever we look today. I remember being astonished at how many of my female college students thought that paying their bills and tuition by trading their bodies with a sugar daddy was perfectly acceptable. I hear profanity being used without shame in public on a regular basis. Bratty behavior by children is routinely ignored by their parents. Expectations for dress have declined to the point where it is apparently acceptable to conduct your errands in your pajamas. Much of what we today consider mainstream entertainment would have been considered pornography in the past. Lying, cheating, and theft are now treated as if they are essential life skills to be learned and cultivated rather that sins to be avoided.

Moreover, we have become a society that is defined by participation trophies rather than a focus on accomplishments, so more and more Americans expect to be rewarded for what they have not earned and are encouraged to demand what they believe they are due regardless of their lack of effort. To even suggest there is a connection between hard work and achievement is now considered victim blaming—or worse. Too many of our adults, particular those whom we consider our intelligentsia, routinely claim that traditional American values of honesty, punctuality, diligence, personal responsibility, and learning are tools of persecution and subjugation, so it is unsurprising that we are plagued with so many lazy, sloppy, stupid people wailing that our nation has failed them.

How and when the wrong turn that put us into the grave situation in which we find ourselves today took place is a question that would probably fill a library, but it seems to me that sometime during the early 1990’s—just as the failed Presidency of George H.W. Bush was ending and Bill Clinton was busily sleazing his way into the White House—our collective psyche starting veering toward a precipitous cliff, and one particularly outlandish cultural moment has always seemed to me like a notable tipping point.

In the fall of 1992, a student at the University of California at Berkeley began walking around campus and attending classes in the nude. Soon dubbed “the Naked Guy” by the press, he was finally expelled from Berkeley a couple of months later, and the university instituted a ban on campus nudity later that year—because this “normal” behavior was no longer self-evident. During his brief moment of exposure (pun intended), the Naked Guy became a celebrity of sorts, garnering a photo layout in Playgirl, being featured in news articles, and even finding himself referenced in a movie. Media outlets that saw only a titillating story should have exercised some responsibility and not released his name to the public so that the mistakes of his youth might not follow him around forever, but this kind of restraint was fast disappearing from our country at that point in time. 

Little wonder that only a few short years later Bill Clinton was humiliating our nation with his lascivious behavior in the Oval Office and his lawyerly lies. The adults, it seemed, no longer cared to act like adults

What struck me at that time, and still sticks with me today regarding the Naked Guy, is apparently no one thought to wonder whether the inability of the college’s administration to act swiftly the very first time he strutted his stuff (so to speak) was, in fact, a watershed moment in enabling the self-destruction of an obviously troubled young man while allowing him to traumatize his fellow students. The very best course of action at the start of this sad and bizarre episode would have been arrest and court-ordered mental health counseling somewhere far away from campus—with an eye toward helping him to return to his education after appropriate counseling and treatment. Allowing him to parade around naked for months before expelling him did neither him nor his classmates any favors.

This is not simply hindsight, although we know the student was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed suicide while in jail. Children, adolescents, and young adults need—desperately need—the guidance of mature adults because their lack of life experience and emotional lability leaves them vulnerable to the hobgoblins of their own minds. Our societal abrogation of firm adult authority, which we sadly see demonstrated every day in homes, schools, and workplaces across America, coupled with our refusal to enforce reasonable standards of behavior, dress, and speech among our youngest citizens is cruelly setting them up for frustration and failure later in their lives because they will simply have no idea how to conduct themselves as adults.

The rise of both a intrusive state apparatus and highly politicized private legal industry—each of which is ready to rush in any time a child is held accountable for misbehavior by a parent, teacher, or police officer—has accelerated a sense of entitlement and a stunning lack of concern for others amongst our last few generations. Today’s political, cultural, and academic leaders are products of this amoral and self-centered social system that teaches all that counts is one’s own feelings, needs, and wants—damn everybody else.

A country that cannot find it within itself to set clear boundaries between what is right and what is wrong is guaranteed to put its children on the wrong path. The problems of the adults of tomorrow are caused by the grievous moral and ethical failures of the adults of today, who find the most important work of parenting—setting limits and enforcing rules—impossible because of their own inability (or refusal) to judge what is good and what is bad because they don’t want to be making those choices. 

We compound our mistakes every time we treat children and adolescents as if they are miniature adults and grant them expansive and highly inappropriate rights when they are far too immature to handle the responsibilities. Despite the facade of maturity so many are able to effect, often much to their own detriment, a fifteen year old today is fundamentally no different from a fifteen year old 100 years ago. They are highly impressionable, insecure, desperate for adult approval, and yearning for protection from a world that is at turns attractive, scary, and confusing. Allowing those who are too young to pick their own bedtimes to make irrevocable decisions about their lives and futures is just one more nail in the coffin of our national character, and we are causing horrible harm to our children each and every time we forget—that they are children.

Just to make it all even worse, instead of protecting and shielding our nation’s young from the mistakes caused by their own immaturity, we give them cell phones so that they can record every unfortunate thought and action of their formative years on Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms without any thought regarding how this permanent and readily-shared documentation might impact the rest of their lives. Rather than wrap our children in a protective cocoon of privacy, we set them up for ridicule and disparagement that will follow them for the rest of their lives. Good job, mom and dad!

The root of the problem is perhaps that there are far too many adults who today see political and financial advantage in undermining parental authority; they encourage our young to act out their most confused and self-destructive emotions while presenting ham-fisted government interventions as the salvation for a society that seems intent on presenting the worst possible role models to children whom we should be teaching and nurturing rather than exploiting. It seems unbelievable, like some ludicrous dystopian movie, that we should be traipsing down this path to national suicide, but we must recognize that, societally speaking, the lunatics are running the asylums of our government bureaucracies, medical schools, mass media, colleges and universities, public schools—and a substantial portion of our elected government.

The blame lies with all of us for allowing these self-anointed “experts” to lay siege to so many of our most vital institutions, and it is the responsibility of every American who still remembers what it means to be an adult, to protect our nation’s young from their baleful and hateful influence before yet more damage is done.

The time to act is now, and the duty is ours alone.