[Futurework] Declining morality or decling responsibility?

[Ed Weick]

The following is based on something I sent to my church Minister as a comment on his sermon yesterday. Ed Weick   A couple of items in the cyber version of the NYTimes this morning dealt with the recent punk-riots in Montreal and the state of the young in the US in general, but especially in Chicago. The latter item pointed out that a large proportion of the young in Chicago have neither finished school nor obtained work. For example, there are about 100,000 young black people in this situation. They own nothing, have almost no future prospects, and therefore have no basis for thinking about things in moral terms. To think in those terms you have to have a stake in something, and they have none. The rioting punkers in Montreal, mostly kids in their teens or early twenties, had a similar make-up. Many lived on the street or in shelters or parks. Some tried to support themselves by cleaning windshields, but were forever being hassled and told to keep moving. While some had completed school, they felt trapped in Quebec because of their limited knowledge of English due to Quebec's policy of educating in French. Like the kids in Chicago, they owned nothing and had very limited prospects. To have a sense of morality, which, put most simply, is the ability to distinguish right from wrong, you have to have some concept of property and boundaries. You have to be able to say to yourself that you can't do something because it is not yours to do and because someone else, not you, has the right to do it. Apparently, the Montreal kids had very little sense of this, although one said that it was OK to wreck cars because "insurance" would pay for it. What we may be seeing in declining moral standards - and I do agree that they are declining - is the growth of a population, especially the young, that has very little place and therefore stake in society. The situation will probably worsen for a couple of reasons. In the US, the enormous costs of the Iraq war and other foreign adventures plus tax cuts for the wealthy are leading to huge budget deficits and a large decline in the ability to spend on social infrastructure such as schools and programs for the young. And in both Canada and the US, public spending will increasingly have to cater to older people as the Baby Boom population ages. There will be less and less for the young and more and more alienation among them. I don't know what traditional custodians of morality such as churches can do about this. Trying to bring the alienated young to church probably won't work. Young people who are panhandling and trying to stay alive won't bother much with churches. Perhaps the only sensible route churches can take is to put pressure on governments to get their houses in order and their priorities straight. However, judging by the kinds of things churches are hung up on, such as the ordination of a gay Bishop in New Hampshire, this is unlikely to happen.