It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by mwm1331
But the whole is greater than any of, or even the sum of, its parts.
Is that American culture? No while it may well be one small part of it it is not the whole. I don't watch MTV therefore it is not a part of Culture as far as I am concerned.
The media doesn't care whether you like what they show you, as long as you watch. Me, I just don't watch.
Those that do not perish. We are nearing the end of or civilization and I would not be surprised if the current war with Islamic terror and the raging culture war combined bring us to our knees in less than a generation. Most refuse to believe the downward spiral I have seen in my short 55 years.
It is a culture of promiscuety (as you said), personal irresponcibility, and the idea that hard work/school/working within the system is not needed to succeed and be happy (which is the exception, not the rule).
Originally posted by CazMedia
Your list accurate impressions of PARTS of Americanna, but again while these things seem more prevalent, they indeed are not the sum of what is America, and to limit the USA by only perpetuating these ideas is the same trap were trying to help ARK see past...there is much more to America...pages more...some good, some not so...some bad.
Originally posted by Arkaleus
I have looked at and weighed every aspect of my generation. My people do not resemble their own ancestors anymore. Their entertainments are nothing but vice.
Every concept of virture that once flourished among the people has vanished. Let me repeat that. We have fled away from our own understanding of good and evil, and replaced it with the very devil.
Look at the entertainments of my own generation. TV reflects the values of a vile and corrupted people. Male - female relationships are more like animal affairs than anything civilized, based upon the make-believe world of screenplays and the music industry.
We have fallen a long ways from the traditions of our fathers, and replaced them with the same old vices that plague every corrupted nation since the dawn of civilization. Promiscuity and divorce and personal vice aren't any different than they were in Ancient times, and they destroy nations just the same way.
America isn't founded on nightclubs, drugs, and a culture of promiscuuity. Those things are VICES, not ok things. They have ALWAYS been vices. They have become universally prevalent among the urbans areas, and my ENTIRE generation considers them to be ok. They don't have any other idea presented to them. Girls consider sexual experience to be somehow good, and boys don't understand what virtue is past getting a job and earning money. These are your children, America. There are my brothers and sisters.
Our entire value system has been hijacked by the marketplace. Now, it isn't good unless it is rich and virtue consists of buying and selling, earning money and contributing to the wealth of the corporations or the community.
These things aren't new: Ancient cultures had the same understanding of these matters as we. Never before have the two been so confused: Holy men were understood to be holy, and the vices of society were always understood to be vices.
Our media has been entirely taken by a monopoly of forces who share the same agenda, namely the ecapsulation of the American popluation into a virtual reality of their creation, where trivial and useless knowledge is pumped 24/7 into the TVs, radios, and newspapers. Nothing outside of the system is given to us, and nothing of any depth is explored within it. It is merely to placate and influence the minds of the masses.
The entire concept of education has been hijacked from its original purpose of producing citizens capable of governing a nation and weighing, judging, and determining the direction of the society in which we live. Now it is a mill in which to learn how to become service to industry, drones in a society in which individuals have absolutely no control or say in its workings, and all lessons of religion, virtue, and classical understand has been systematically stripped away.
In the place of any real knowledge or science, the masses remain illiterate as their ancient ancestors in any real sense, they can read letters and write, but have no knoeldge of what came before, or any ability to discern the future. They are drones, because they were prepared to be drones, by other drones, who are not able to make anything but drones.
Can you name the publicly enshrined virtues of the nation? If it doesn't have any, then it is dead. If the people can't tell good from evil, then they are all given over to evil and it won't be long before they fall into ruin.
It's not like there's never been a great nation on the earth before. There have been several, and they all follow the same rule. Most of them lasted longer than a few hundred years before they fell into ruin. I don't think evil has ever held such a total rule over a nation as large as America before. That perhaps is a new thing. But how much faster will it break down then?
Thoughts? I would love to hear you on this one. Please give me a reason to defend my country.
Arkaleus
All I have to say Ark, is youhave been watching the Matrix a few too may times. And i coulsn't find the quote but you were talking about climbing high trees and that people who live on the ground don't understand you. Anyways that was one of the most ignorant things i have ever read in my life, especially coming from a self professed intellectual who has cleansed his spirit and asks us to do the same.
Another thing i have to ask is who are you to decide what is filth and what isn't? I agree with you that culturally the west has fallen dramatically, but not because of the perversions it allows, i can guarantee you that, remember, prostituion isn't called the oldest profession for nothing, and marijuana is one of the oldest herbal medicines iused by humans on the earth.
Cheers, gotta go teach i'll write some more in a while
Originally posted by jawapunk
Another thing i have to ask is who are you to decide what is filth and what isn't? I agree with you that culturally the west has fallen dramatically, but not because of the perversions it allows, i can guarantee you that, remember, prostituion isn't called the oldest profession for nothing, and marijuana is one of the oldest herbal medicines iused by humans on the earth.