We turned the clocks back last Sunday morning, but it was only for an hour, and likely many didn’t really care. Some on the “progressive” side of the cultural divide would care if we turned them back 60 years, but not 60 minutes.
Sixty years ago, there was plenty wrong with some people in this country but at least we knew what right and wrong meant, and the vast majority generally pursued what was right. We had just emerged from World War II a decade earlier and we knew what wrong was. The attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Blitzkrieg were wrong. After the war, wrong was deserting your family back home, just as wrong as walking off the battlefield. Wrong was walking away from your obligations and responsibilities. Wrong was breaking the law. Divorce was uncommon and unspeakable. Adultery was wrong. And, the justice system had teeth to the extent that capital punishment was a deterrent.
After sixty years of “progress,” desertion apparently results in no jail time, divorce is commonplace and celebrated, and no one studies history anymore. “Progress” has brought us the inability to know the difference between right and wrong or the temerity to declare that there is not right or wrong. “Progress” has us witnessing adultery in our media and sin celebrated in the streets, and a justice system that doesn’t even deter a church shooting on a Texas Sunday morning. And it’s not going to get any better.
A book I read recently suggested that there will be a thousand times more change in this century than the last. Change I don’t fear. But “progress”? That’s another story. In the next century, we will have a million times more technology than we do now.
Can we “rein in” progress, or is our culture already lost? Without some sort of cataclysm on the order of a World War, where our national and personal survival are threatened enough to have us reconsider the meaning of right and wrong, assume responsibility for ourselves and our family units, and rediscover our own American history, I don’t hold out much hope for our culture.
And, when I am in mourning for our culture, the landscape I hope for looks a lot like it did for me sixty years ago. If only we could roll the clocks back that far. The scenes remind me of the strains of an old country song:
Grandpa, tell me ’bout the good old days
Sometimes it feels like this world’s gone crazy
And Grandpa, take me back to yesterday
When the line between right and wrong
Didn’t seem so hazy
Did lovers really fall in love to stay
And stand beside each other, come what may?
Was a promise really something people kept
Not just something they would say and then forget
Did families really bow their heads to pray
Did daddies really never go away?
Oh, Grandpa, tell me ’bout the good old days
Grandpa, everything is changing fast
We call it progress, but I just don’t know
And Grandpa, let’s wander back into the past
And paint me the picture of long ago
Did lovers really fall in love to stay
And stand beside each other, come what may?
Was a promise really something people kept
Not just something they would say and then forget
Did families really bow their heads to pray
Did daddies really never go away?
Oh, Grandpa, tell me ’bout the good old days
Title: “Grandpa”
Performed by: The Judds
Songwriter: Jamie O’hara
Grandpa lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC