Has America Succumbed To Ruthless, Crude Irreverence?

[Mr. Ected]

You hear it every day on the radio, on the television. It is spewed from our leaders, from our pundits, from our co-workers, from our school children. Scathing, heartless critiques of others for the way they look, sound, or choose to live their lives. We have a DU OP that tells us that Susan Boyle is ugly. The mockery of anything sweet and lovely seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

I have a couple of small children, and I try to instill in them the importance of treating others with respect and dignity and withholding abusive comments. Nothing good can come of tearing down our culture, our history, or our pride or moment of glory, be it individual or collective, when the entire purpose is simply to destroy.

In his book, Reverence: Renewing A Forgotten Virtue, Paul Woodruff answers the question of whether irreverence can ever be considered a virtue: "No, but many of our contemporaries would say yes. In an irreverent society, crude behavior may be highly successful. Crudeness then looks like irreverence, with the result that irreverence looks like a virtue. Not so. Both of these appearances are misleading. Protesting bad leadership is never irreverent. Irreverence is the violation of reverence, but in the neighborhood of bad leaders there is little reverence to violate".

Am I alone in this? Am I alone?