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The West is on a disastrous course with economic liberalism eroding all kinds of moral restraints. Family institution is disintegrating and kids and youth are vulnerable to all undesirable influences.
Early this year, a Chicago public school CEO was stumped by a question at a press conference in Bangalore. The CEO was heralding the arrival of its franchisee school* in this tech-hub of India proudly declaring that it will bring in American values. The reporter asked whether it would mean shootouts, condoms and junk food culture.
Juvenile crime is making a steep climb in the United States. Societies that follow the consumerist fads are all likely to be vulnerable to the vulgarization of social mores a la the West, regardless of all those full-throated discourses on human rights, gender rights emanating from the capitalist world. The era of liberalization has unfortunately unleashed the massive cultural onslaught from which no home with a TV with dish antenna or Internet is immune. No wonder kids in the developing countries inculcated with same consumerist values copy their Western counterparts&. Of course, just a swallow would not make a summer. But threat of erosion of moral framework of the society is not beyond sight.
The West’s decadence is fast pacing towards its crescendo. It is difficult to imagine where its escalating exhibitionism and recklessness of behaviour is going to lead it and its followers. An average Western individual is a lonely, empty and shallow person who is completely adrift. Despite all that cutting edge technology in communication systems and the resulting information explosion, he remains emotionally-starved.
Permissiveness inexorably leads to negation of moral framework of the society. It is this perversion of the moral values that has led to homosexuality traveling from ‘mental disease’ in the 1972 edition of American Diagnostic Handbook to ‘orientation’ in the very next edition and still later ‘a choice of lifestyle’, in short a normal phenomenon which should not be subjected to therapy or law. People in Scandinavian countries now ask why not allow narcotics in the market on market principles of consumer needs. It is argued that outlawing narcotics increases their appeal and encourages illicit trade, thus creating victims instead of satisfied consumers.
Today, people do not want to live with any sort of restraints and residue of traditional values. It is simply unfashionable. They want to pursue their hedonist credo by busily cramming their limited, little lives with as much sensual gratification as possible while completely ignoring the common good or the family values. Both family orientation and hospitality were at the heart of the loving kindness and consideration, typical of Islamic communities, even Hindu homes and indeed of the entire East. Alas! Family, the bedrock of human society, is witnessing a collapse. Symptoms of this calamity are indeed frightening in the US: 200 per cent growth in single parent homes since 1970; 70 per cent juvenile offenders coming from single-parent home; married couples with kids made up only 26 per cent in 1990 of the US households down from 40 per cent in 1970; 36 per cent of the kids telling that their daily chores included making their own meals in 1993 against only 13 per cent in 1978; children having witnessed 8,000 televised murders before they finish their elementary school and 10,000 scenes of violence before this age; one in six youths between the ages of 10 to 17 having seen or known someone who has been shot; children under 18 being 244 per cent more likely to be killed by guns than they were in 1986@.
Today not more than 15 per cent of new marriages in the US are given a statistical chance of survival. In Scandinavia, more than half of the children are born out of wedlock. Millions of single mothers are about to release an entire generation of youngsters into society whose emotional development may have been hampered by the absence of a father to a point where their mature behaviour as a mate may suffer. Single motherhood may be an unavoidable fate in many cases. More young women in Germany, about 30 per cent of them, now choose to remain childless.
These days, insurance policies are available to purchase coverage for the financial consequences of unwanted parenthood. When both parents work they tend to assuage their guilty conscience by bribing their kids with the latest toys, trying to buy their love, thus raising a little extortionist new generation which is hopelessly addicted to consumerism. In their formative years their kids are turned over to their peer groups, where all-too often underage ring leaders armed budding criminals are already running their own drug businesses.
Serial polygamy in the West has eroded the family beyond the boundaries of parents. Children born out of several different spouses spawn multiple sets of grandparents rendering the structure of extended families largely amorphous. They have to be therefore essentially consigned to old aged homes. If children feel rejected at home and in school and ostracized by their peers, it is only logical that violence breaks out, as in the recent American school shoot-outs. TV and video games suggest violence as the ultimate solution to problems and treat sex like a merchandise. Emotionally starved children gradually cross the vanishing threshold to adulthood from the virtual to the real world.
Kids in dysfunctional families feel that they are not loved, unwanted and superfluous. It is reported that 55.5 per cent of American teenagers are following the lead of the adults when they take to smoking to fight stress. German author Murad Wilfred Hofmann says they tend to become ‘screenagers’ than teenagers, in the worst cases spending more than 30 hours per week in front of computer games and movie screens#. Thus virtual violence begets real violence. Should then people be surprised when shooting outrages take place such as the 1999 Columbine High School in Denver, Colorando or Virginia Tech University or the latest ones? Only surprise is that these shootouts do not surprise several of us. We need to be questioning : Are we ready to pay the price of cosying up to the unbridled liberalism imported from the West?
Notes and References
* - It was a press conference announcing the opening of Treamis World School in Bangalore in April 2007.
& - Two school kids in a school in Gurgaon near Delhi shot and killed their colleague following a tiff in the school in December 2007.
@ - Newsweek, Jan. 10, 1994
# - Murad W. Hofmann, Religion on the Rise, Amana publications, Beltsville, MD. USA, 2001
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