YES ITS DEPRESSING, BUT PRETENDING WON'T CHANGE IT

Bruce Walker has an excellent article on the state of what's left of our culture. His conclusion:

Strip honesty, knowledge, amusement, family, country, and belief from communal life and nothing, much, is left. That is where we are today. That is why the blathering television set and the chattering classrooms seem so utterly empty. That is why so many young people, born after the end of civil life, accept any dream world so completely. Civil life has died. More specifically, it has been murdered by those who find no meaning in life and no purpose for existence. They wish us to live as they do: desperately alone.

He goes runs down the sources of our emptiness. For instance:

The very act of lying, once considered evil, is now considered proof of shrewdness. How well someone can "spin" truth is considered rather like how a tennis player or a baseball pitcher can spin a ball.

If truth does not matter, then the accumulation of truth which we call learning cannot matter either. Public education and academia is simply re-education. Children and college students are taught "facts" that round out political indoctrination. There was a time when education meant exposing growing minds to a universe of facts which supported conflicting opinions and grasping the thinking behind those opinions. The myth of the intolerant medieval university or old public school systems of America is evidence of just how little our modern totalitarians actually know: debate, controversy, cognition, and schools of thought were the norm, not the exception. The very term "schools of thought," no longer exists. In our murdered civil life, there is "the school of thought," surrounded by barbed wire.

Think about it. It really IS no big deal anymore. We have become so used to it, it doesnt even register. And no, it's not very uplifting, but if we are not clear on the problems, how the HELL will we ever find our way home?

Well worth reading the whole thing.