Keep It Pithy (10 page)

In short, this country has developed a ridiculous blind spot: the power and glorification of money.

This is truly an affliction. It is holding us back as a nation, as a community. The true heroes of America are not the new Internet billionaires or the overpaid sports stars and movie actors or the wise guys who jack up their companies’ stocks. The true heroes of America are the men, women, and teenagers who go to work for a modest wage, fulfill their responsibilities to their families and friends, and are kind and generous to others—because that’s the right way to live.… The working people of the United States are the most important ingredient in the enduring American story.

But the rich and powerful have forgotten or never learned that bedrock truth. Or they simply don’t care.

But forget them
.

Each of us is, to a large degree, in control of our own lives
.

That includes me; that includes you
.

Why is there so much drug and alcohol abuse in America today?

Simple: Alcohol and drugs make huge profits for legal and illegal organizations.

Simple again: Much of the population is bullish on intoxication … [“I want mine”]. And set in their ways. Dedicated pot smokers believe they are “mellow” and look down on crackheads nodding out in alleyways or deserted basements. Young professionals sniffing coke know that they’re on top of the world, masters of the universe: The drug tells them so. The country club set, knocking back martinis and Manhattans and Cosmopolitans, looks down on the rednecks at the noisy beer joint across the county line, and the writers and intellectuals at the local college sneer at both groups for being “alkies” but believe that a trip on the latest psychedelic drug is an intellectual adventure. But everyone has one belief in common: I can handle my “drug of choice.”

Here’s the takeaway: If you are after success in America, substance abuse can be your downfall.

Some of the drugs may have changed since I wrote the above, but the moral is the same. Self-indulgence, and especially harmful, debilitating self-indulgence, is not going to give you what you want. It will keep you from getting what you want
.

But it’s not that simple. Do you know anyone who is “just saying no”? I hope you do, but I have several reasons to doubt it
.

Try these (the stats have changed since 2001, when I printed this list, but the story line is much the same):

       1. There are in excess of 10 million “heavy drug users” in the United States.

       2. Approximately 70 percent of street crime is drug related.

       3. Approximately 70 percent of all child abuse is committed by substance abusers (this includes those who abuse alcohol).

       4. There are more than 1 million DUI arrests annually in the United States.

And now, voters in several states, as we saw in the 2012 elections, think that it’s “bitchin’ ” (if you recall that word from California in the late sixties) to legalize marijuana
.

There are three basic strategies needed to control America’s drug problem. First, impose coerced drug rehab on all criminals who are arrested and test positive for narcotics. Second, use the U.S. military to assist the Border Patrol from Brownsville, Texas, to Imperial Beach, California, and use
the Navy to assist the Coast Guard. And third, sentence major and persistent drug sellers to banishment in faraway federal penitentiaries.… Back in the 1960s my father told me that anyone who dealt dope was a parasite, a person beneath contempt. I always remembered that. How many children are being told that today, especially in the ghetto neighborhoods? What do kids think when they encounter the sleazy dealer?

SEVEN

THE KIDS

Hollywood Sleaze, Wrongheaded Educators, Nutty Judges, and Other Problems Knocking on the Door

The assault on traditional values is especially insidious when various elements of society, from entertainment to the schools, from advertisers to judges, ambush our kids at school, on the playground, or over broadcast media and the Internet
.

Where to begin?

How about 2006?

For the secular-progressive movement to achieve its goals in America, it must undermine traditional parental authority and convince children there’s a brave new world out there that does not include being raised in the traditional way. The S-P goal is to diminish parental authority, which, in the past, had been unquestioned.

This is a strategy—mentally separate children from their parents—that has been practiced by totalitarian governments all throughout history. In Nazi Germany, there was
the Hitler Youth. Chairman Mao created the Children’s Corps in Red China. Stalin and Castro rewarded children who spied on their parents. That’s the blueprint.

If you want to change a country’s culture and traditions, children must first abandon them and embrace a new vision. Hello, secular-progressivism in the USA. I’m not saying these people are little Adolfs; I
am
saying they have adopted some totalitarian tactics in their strategies.

I want you to recall how the courts can weigh in on the S-P agenda
.

Kids seven to ten years old in Palmdale, California, were required by the school district to take a very disturbing sex survey. Sample question: “How often do you think about sex?” That’s not a misprint, folks. You can read the whole story in my book
Culture Warrior
,
pages 124–27
.

But here’s the pith:

The parents sued the district in federal court. [The case went up to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most liberal federal court in U.S. history.] … Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote the unanimous opinion, which stated that parents of public school children have no fundamental right to be the exclusive provider of sexual information to their children. Reinhardt was direct: “Parents are possessed of no constitutional right to prevent the public schools from providing information on that subject to their students in
any forum or manner
they select.… No such specific [parental] right can be found in the deep roots of the nation’s history and tradition or implied in the concept of ordered liberty.”

That noise you hear coming from underground?

It’s the sound of the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves
.

Remember “Captain” Lou Albano, the wrestler? He always said, “This stuff is fake. Don’t try it at home.”

So listen to me, someone whom you know from TV, when I say, “Be careful what you let your kids watch, and what they start to believe, if they fall for everything they see on TV.”

It started back in the fifties.…