Phil Brennan
Wednesday, March 14, 2001

I don't know exactly what got me into this reflective mood, but I suspect it was the sudden realization that I am often seen as speaking an alien language – using slang expressions that few people understand, referring to names of folks or events once well-known that nowadays fall on deaf ears. Even using common Latin expressions, which brings e-mail inquiring what, for example, Dominus vobiscum means.

Take the aforementioned Rip Van Winkle, for example. I can picture a lot of readers asking themselves, "Who the hell was he?"

This is all very disconcerting to someone who writes for a livelihood. The purpose of writing is to communicate, and if large numbers of one's readers don't understand what I'm writing, communication fails.

But it's not just now-forgotten words and names or events that tend to set me apart from a large majority of my fellow Americans – it's the fact that this present world seems centuries away from the world in which I grew up. Somehow I've become an anachronism.

I don't want to get into one of those "Let me tell you about the Big One" dialogues I used to get drawn into when accosted in drinking establishments by WWI vets who were convinced that this young Marine didn't have any idea of what real war was all about, and needed to be given the inside story.

Nor do I want to go into a long story about how I walked X number of miles through snow drifts to get to school when I was a kid. To begin with, I didn't, and if I had it would make no difference anyway. What I do want to deal with here is the enormous transition I have seen take place since my youth and the present day. This is in no way an exercise in old-fogeyism, but rather an attempt to show that what is today regarded as progress has actually been a downward plunge into a decadence that is reducing many of our brothers and sisters to a level barely above that of the beasts we are now assured are our equals, if not our betters.

In a word, in the last 60 or so years we have gone from certitude to uncertainty in just about every sphere of life.

Back in the 1930s, there was much that was considered sacrosanct. Today nothing is sacred.

Back then, there was a very clear distinction between what was right and what was wrong, nobody but the scrubby wacked-out communists, militant atheists, academic weirdos and all-around malcontents questioned the existence of a natural law that both transcended and undergirded mankind's law, and its effect on our very existence. That belief rested upon the word of God as expressed in both Scripture and tradition, and upon centuries of experience.

It taught what I call the law of consequence: Do this, and that will happen. It is a law based on all of mankind's history – over and over again those who defied it suffered the inevitable consequences of their acts. If you go out in the rain uncovered, you'll get wet.

Today we have, in our great wisdom, repealed that law. The law of watch what you do or you'll suffer the consequences is now replaced by the law of anything goes and don't worry about paying for it.

I hate to get into the matter of kids killing kids – there's really more than enough talk about it already – but it's simply too apropos of what I'm getting at to avoid.

Just what did we expect? We have created a culture of death. Life has been cheapened to the extent that it has little or any practical value. Kids look around and see babies being killed in the womb for the sake of convenience and their remains marketed like choice cuts of meat, with government approval and support. They see euthanasia contemplated as a legitimate alternative to nursing homes, or they watch so much homicide on TV that murder is a commonplace event and human life is without any real value.

Sixty years ago, abortion was a crime. It was recognized for what it is: the murder of an innocent human being. Abortionists went to jail. Then the United States Supreme Court decided that it was perfectly OK for a mother to slaughter the child in her womb if that's what she felt like doing. They never said it isn't what it has always been seen to be: murder. They just said it was a woman's right to murder her unborn child. Since then 30 or 40 million unborn children in America have been butchered in the most unspeakable ways – diced up, scalded to death, yanked from the birth canal, and had scissors stabbed into their necks and their brains vacuumed out while still alive.

Kids lucky enough to have survived nine months in the womb without being killed know this. All of it. Do you think it has no effect on their view of the value of human life?

Study after study shows what we once knew instinctively: Broken homes create broken lives. Divorce was once a mark of shame - today it's just another inevitable part of married life. The deadly effect it has on kids – well demonstrated – is accepted as the price to be paid for the convenience divorce offers a couple who choose to be incompatible. No couples who choose to dissolve their marriage bonds emerge without suffering.

With the benefit of 2,000 years of observing marriage behind it, the Catholic Church has always recognized divorce as destructive not only to the couple and their offspring, but to society as a whole. Strong families build strong societies, and anything that threatens the stability and strength of the family threatens the stability and the strength of society. Divorce is simply not an alternative – and permitted only in the most serious of marital situations.

During the marriage ceremony, a couple pledges fidelity to one another until death does them part. It's a commitment. Nowadays few couples making their vows see that commitment as binding, even as they make it, and often seek to dissolve it for the most trivial of reasons. But with its wisdom, buttressed by 2,000 years of experience, the Church recognizes the severe psychological effects of divorce upon both parties – few survivors of divorce escape without the scars inflicted during the severing of their marriage commitment. This is a given, yet few are willing to see the destructiveness inherent in the process or the effect it has on society.

The experience of their parents' divorce leaves children feeling unloved and unwanted – and often with feelings of guilt over their imagined role as somehow having been a contributing cause of their parents' breakup. It isn't a stretch to see those feelings explode into rage against others, or erupt in other disastrous ways over a lifetime of suffering the consequences of their parents' breakup.

Sexual depravity was once seen for what it is – depraved and dehumanizing and destructive to the societies that tolerate it. Today we celebrate sexual perversion as just one more admirable form of diversity. We pass laws protecting it in some of its most outlandish and morally disgusting forms.

We ignore the lessons of history that prove how destructive acceptance of moral depravity as the norm has been on past civilizations, from ancient Greece and Rome up until modern times. Decadent societies decay – and vanish into the dustbin of history.

Our certitude, as I've said, was based not on opinion, or even solely on religious belief – it was rooted in mankind's vast experience. Today we've shed all that certitude. It is mocked as bigotry and worse. Who, we are asked, are we to say this or that is wrong? Wrong and right are what present-day society chooses to say they are. There is no certitude, no anchor against the winds of fate. We are adrift in a sea of man-made uncertainty.

Well, my answer is we are students of man's long history. We refuse to ignore what experience teaches. And for that we are condemned as ignorant bigots.

Just wait. The consequences of this arrogance have only just begun to appear. Gunfire in school corridors is merely the advance guard of an army of retributive horrors yet to come.

And that's why I wonder what I'm doing here.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee. He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.