Beginnings of Behaving Badly

Common courtesy ain't all that common anymore. So what happened to it? Well do you remember years ago the arguments that "you can't legislate morality"? Well that's it. Instead of legislating morality (which is really what laws are) we legislated immorality. We protected bad behavior.

Arguments were made that you couldn't teach morals or values in school. And now we wonder why our children behave so badly. Teachers can't punish students, so now we have teachers who fear for their lives. We said you shouldn't be held responsible for your own actions. That you shouldn't have to deal with the consequences, and that your mistakes aren't your fault but somebody else's anyway. We abandoned the idea that we need to first ensure that our children become decent human beings. And now we wonder why people behave so badly?

Capitalism doesn't work well without strong ethics, but we said we couldn't teach those and we wonder what's going wrong. And instead of taking a long hard look at what we've done, we use this mistake to justify government becoming our nanny. So now the same people who said we couldn't legislate morality are legislating EVERYTHING. We couldn't teach children the difference between right and wrong , but can now legislate what they can eat, what they can say, and how warm they can keep their houses? Now we expel a child for bringing an aspirin to school or for praying for a friend and yet we don't punish verbal or physical attacks on teachers. Where the heck have our priorities gone?

The funny thing is that when I went to school I could take aspirin for my headaches but if I back talked a teacher I was in serious trouble. When did we make this switch and why? I understand that we need to be worried about drugs in school, but we should be as concerned as what comes out of a child's mouth as what goes in it.