Life in the Big Auditorium
April 6, 2024
ALAN writes:
Fifty-seven years ago, I sat alone in a high school auditorium during the noon hour and tried to read — not reading required for classes, but books of my own choice. It was hard to do that because elsewhere in that auditorium at that hour were other students who took delight in being loud and boisterous. I was never one of them. I purposely chose a seat on the other side of the auditorium to get as far away from them as I could.
I was not a joiner or a “group person”. By 1967 I had graduated from loud and boisterous and never regretted it. I found something much better: Silence and solitude in which to think, read, question, weigh and consider in realms of knowledge, history, philosophy, science, and current events.
I did not realize it then, but I had discovered (and preferred) the interior voice at a time when cultural forces like the “mass media” and mass entertainment were doing their best to overwhelm or extinguish the interior voice.
I was not the only such individual in that school, but we added up to a tiny percentage of the school population. In the 1930s-’40s, most of that loud and boisterous crowd would have been working at some productive job. But in the 1960s they were reveling in a form of prolonged childhood made possible for them by their too-lenient and too-accommodating parents, those in the so-called “greatest generation”.
Most of those in that generation said little and did even less to oppose the conversion of high schools, colleges, and universities into playpens for prolonged adolescence.
Those in the “greatest generation” believed in the 1960s that the future for their children looked bright and promising. I heard them say so at the New York World’s Fair in 1965.
Why is that significant today? Because American society today is that high school auditorium writ large — except worse: A national population of adolescent-witted boy-men and girly-women whooping it up around the clock in the cultural equivalent of an amusement park that never closes. That crowd in 1967 may have been loud and rambunctious, but they were not hooligans, vandals, or vulgarians. They had the excuse of being young. What excuse do fully-grown Americans have today? That high school today stands abandoned, boarded-up and vandalized beyond description. What excuse do St. Louisans today have for allowing such buildings to be vandalized and remain that way for decades?
The irony is that their descendants now live with more lawlessness, more incompetence, more debt, fewer rights, less liberty, less privacy, less national security, less personal security, and far more excuses than older Americans could have imagined in 1965. Virtually all public and semi-public places are now dominated by marginally-literate, poorly-educated, foul-mouthed, young and middle-aged teeny-boppers whose principle concern is to be thought cool, hip, and “with it”. They practice license but call it freedom. Their ignorance of ethics, manners, speech, apparel, and conduct is nearly perfect, and their arrogance and ingratitude toward their ancestors is certainly unprecedented in American history. Welcome to life in the Big Auditorium.
