February 26, 2008 – 11:46 am
SOCIAL ILLS SEEN AS RUIN OF NATIONS — (House of Representatives - October 20, 2003)
“History teaches us that, most of the world’s great powers are not overcome by external force, but rather disintegrate internally”
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Nunes). Under the Speaker’s announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, I was privileged to hear British Prime Minister Tony Blair speak in this Chamber a few months ago, and one comment he made particularly caught my attention. He said, “As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible, but in fact, it is transitory.” I think what he was saying is that essentially nothing lasts forever, including great nations.
History teaches us that, most of the world’s great powers are not overcome by external force, but rather disintegrate internally. And let us take a quick study of three such examples.
Rome, of course, 2,000 odd years ago, stood astride the then-civilized world and appeared to be invincible. Yet it fell from preeminence, and the reasons historians have given us, there was a general decline in morality, increasing corruption and instability in leadership, an increasing public addiction to ever more violent public spectacles, an increase in crime and prostitution, and a populace that had become more self-absorbed, apathetic, and unwilling to sacrifice for the common good.
Then, of course, the country that Tony Blair was referring to, Great Britain, had a colonial empire that dominated much of the world through much of the 1800s, and, of course, that empire slowly began to crumble. The reasons that some have given for this demise was that Great Britain had lost the national resolve to maintain its territory, values that led to ascendancy were eroded, spiritual underpinnings were shifted at some point.
The third example would be the Soviet Union, one of two great super powers as recently as 20 years ago, and in a matter of months, Russian disintegrated before our eyes. Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflected on this fall when he observed that, “Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall a number of older people offering the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia, men have forgotten God, that is why all of this has happened.”
And so, Marx and Lenin dismantled Russia’s heritage and value system. Russia’s foundation was broken, and it collapsed like a house of cards with nothing to sustain it.
These are just three examples. I think there are many others that history is replete with that show the declines of some great nations, again without any outside military intervention. I think some of the common themes that we begin to see are that in cases like these, citizens are less willing to sacrifice for others and for country, citizens become more self-absorbed, a greater desire for comfort, for the state to provide for their welfare, a weakening of commonly held values and a decline of spiritual commitment in those countries.
What does all this have to do with the United States and our present situation? I hope I am not overdrawing the case here, but I would have to say that right now we are certainly on top, we have the most powerful military, the strongest economy, the most stable government of any nation in the world and so it is easy to think, as Tony Blair mentioned, that we are invincible but also as he said, as Britain knows, all predominant power for a time seems invincible, but in fact it is transitory. I think that was a well-taken word of warning.
Over 36 years of coaching and dealing with young people, I saw some very disturbing signs. I am going to take some time this evening to develop the theme that I saw occurring before my very eyes over that 36-year period that I think certainly bode a sense of warning, at least as far as I am concerned. The young men that I worked with were more talented with each year, yet they showed more signs of stress, they had more personal struggles, and they had less moral clarity as the years went by.
This chart here to my left reflects at least one alarming trend. In 1960, which was about the time that I started working with young people, we had roughly 400,000 cases that were referred to the juvenile courts. In 1999, that figure was well over 1.6 million. I would say today in 2003, this is the most recent figures that we have, but I would imagine that by 2002, 2003, the caseload is much higher. That represents a 400 percent increase. I really do not care what figure you look at; you will find that the chart looks about like this for issues such as teen pregnancy, teenage murder, violence, drug and alcohol abuse involving teenagers and, of course, the divorce rate for seniors and all the other social pathology that we are so familiar with. I think there are several factors that contributed to these changes that we see here. I would say the first major factor is simply some of the things that have happened to our family structure in the United States. In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate was 5 percent. Today it is right at 33 percent, a 600 percent increase. So roughly one out of three children coming into our Nation today have basically two strikes against them and in most cases will not have both a father and mother to care for them. Some will, but most will not.
In 1960, the great majority of children lived with both biological parents. Today nearly one-half grow up without both biological parents. Only 7 percent of today’s families are traditional families as we would normally define it, with usually a father working full-time, a mother at home full-time or vice versa, but at least one parent being at home and one parent being the primary provider. This is according to the Fatherhood Initiative statistics.
So actually in many cases, and as a matter of fact in some cases, in most cases with our children, nobody is home after 3 p.m., and between 3 and 6 p.m. we find the greatest source of problems, of criminal activity and so on with our children, because no one is home. Parents today spend 40 percent less time with their children than they did a generation ago. The divorce rate, of course, has increased 300 percent since 1960 and 24 million children today live without their biological father. Fatherless children are more likely to be abused, have mental and emotional problems, abuse drugs and alcohol, commit suicide, commit a crime and be promiscuous.
I think this is graphically driven home when we realize what a greeting card company did a few years ago when they approached the prisoners in one of our Federal prisons. It was Mother’s Day. They said, we’ll give you prisoners a Mother’s Day card free if you’ll just simply send your mother a card and they had almost 100 percent participation. And so they thought that this was somewhat gratifying. They thought, well, when Father’s Day comes around, we will do the same thing. They made the same offer with Father’s Day cards and as you may suppose, maybe you would not suppose, there were no takers. That shows you the devastation, particularly in some of our disaffected population, that fatherlessness has caused and I think really is at the root of most of the social pathology that we see in front of us.
The foundation of our culture, the family, is certainly under assault and we have seen great changes over the last 30 to 40 years. Another major issue that has contributed to some of the problems that our young people are dealing with today is that the environment has changed. The environment that they live and move and have their being in is not the same as it was back in the 1940s and the 1950s and even the early part of the 1960s. In 1960, drug abuse was almost unheard of. I know in the area of the country that I lived in, I had heard the word marijuana, I had never seen any instances of it, had never heard of cocaine, methamphetamines, ecstacy and so on; and of course today those drugs are of somewhat epidemic proportion. Alcohol abuse involving underage drinking has exploded.
I would like to take a little time right now, Mr. Speaker, to develop this particular theme because so often we feel in the United States that the drug problem has to do with hard drugs, but by far the biggest drug problem that we are facing today with our young people is that of alcohol. A recent National Academy of Science study that was released, I believe 2 weeks ago, showed that alcohol kills 6.5 times more children than all other drugs combined. More than cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy and all of those drugs put together, alcohol kills 6.5 times more.
Underage drinking costs the U.S. $53 billion annually, 2 1/2 times what it is going to cost us to rebuild Iraq. There are more than 3 million teenage
alcoholics estimated in our country today. This is by far the biggest drug problem. The average age of first drink in our country is currently 12.8 years of age, less than 13 years of age; and the discouraging thing is that when young people drink, on the average they will consume almost twice as much alcohol per occurrence as an adult will. So young people on average tend to drink to get drunk and they often do. Twenty percent of our eighth graders drink regularly. Children who drink before age 15 are four times more likely to become alcoholics because of psychological and physiological immaturity. Alcohol impacts them much differently when they are 12 and 13 and 14 and 15 years old than it impacts them when they are 24, 25, or 26. And so there is a great increase in addiction.
The thing that I would really like to emphasize, Mr. Speaker, is this, that young people for the most part do not start their experimentation with illegal drugs by using marijuana, they do not start with cocaine, they do not start with methamphetamine. They start with alcohol. Therefore, if you really want to stop the abuse of hard drugs, the important thing to do is start with stopping the abuse of alcohol with underage drinkers.
Yet we have really pretty much ignored this whole problem because we spend more than 25 times as much money on curbing illegal hard drugs as we do on underage drinking. We spend a minimal amount discouraging young people from drinking as underaged young people. We spend hundreds of millions to fight drug production in Afghanistan and Colombia and around the world and a fraction of that money spent on curbing underage drinking would be more cost effective. It would dry up the demand. I think some type of a national advertising program, a national education program with a fairly large infusion of dollars at the Federal level is warranted. It would probably help us cure and clear up the drug problem more than anything else that we could do in this country.
Pornography has exploded. We have over 1 million porn sites on the Internet. Not 1,000. Not 100,000. We have 1 million porn sites currently on the Internet. That is unthinkable. I think when the Internet first began many years ago, no one would have assumed that this was even possible or probable. And here it is and so nine out of 10 children ages 9 through 16 have viewed pornography on the Internet. Again, that is nine out of 10 children who are ages 9 through 16 have viewed pornography. Much of that is hard core pornography, which really sears an impression into your mind that sometimes you really cannot get out of it and most of that viewing has been unintentional. It has been by accident.
We have corporations such as AT&T that have been involved in hard core pornography. At one time AT&T I think was the gold standard as far as how a large corporation should be run. Yet we find some of our most reputable companies involved in this industry which yields profits of 10 to $15 billion a year. And so the profit motive certainly supersedes any national interest that they might perceive. Such words as Barbie, Disney, ESPN, at one time my name, would pull up a porn site. And so a child who innocently wants to do research or look at some information regarding their hobby will oftimes pull up a porn site, and we do not seem to be able to do anything about it.
Many of us are dismayed by the way the FCC is regulating obscenity on the Nation’s airwaves. They are the primary arbiter. They are the ones who are supposed to be the watchdog in this area. According to the Parents Television Council as of July 23, 2003, the FCC had not fined a single broadcast station in the United States for airing indecent material. Also they had not suspended a single license in the United States for airing indecent material. Not in the entire history of the FCC have they done anything like this, despite thousands of complaints. This is something, Mr. Speaker, that absolutely needs to change. Many of us in this body are attempting to cause the FCC to begin to take their responsibility seriously.
The Department of Justice has been focusing on eliminating child pornography but has done relatively little to enforce hard core Internet obscenity laws. Of course the Department of Justice has had their hands full, particularly since 9/11. We realize that they have a very heavy caseload. But we have really petitioned the Department of Justice to get more active. In the preceding 8 years prior to 2000, practically nothing was done to enforce obscenity laws in the Department of Justice, and we feel that we have not seen a whole lot of action in the last couple of years as well.
Another issue that has been a concern is that of the video game industry, eight- to 18-year-old children average spending 40 minutes per day playing video games. Again, 40 minutes a day on the average, ages 8 through 18. And video games, as most people know, have become increasingly violent. A recent video game that was displayed to Members of Congress showed stalking and killing activities that are used on training films in the military to teach people how to kill people. In this particular video game, if you were a good shot and you hit somebody in a vital spot, such as the head, blood spurted and everything happened; the reward was several frames of pornographic material.
This is, as far as I am concerned, off the charts. I do not think the average adult can even conceive of some of the things that our children are seeing in terms of video games. The average player of video games is 12 years of age. The Kentucky school shooter who was very effective and killed several of his classmates had never fired a gun prior to the day that he took a gun to school, but he had been very proficient in playing video games, and he had done a lot of firing and shooting in video games which translated apparently quite well into his activities on the school ground that day.
In addition to some of these issues, I would have to say that our value system has shifted considerably. Stephen Covey wrote the book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” several years ago, and the thing that he noted was this: he said that in the first 150 years of our country’s history, success was primarily defined in terms of character traits. A successful person was honest, a successful person was loyal, a successful person was hard working, kind, et cetera, generous. And then he said something happened about 50, 60 years ago as he began to survey the literature of our Nation as it had to do with the issue of success, he noticed that success began to be defined more and more in terms of material possessions. A successful person was no longer one who had good character; a successful person was one who had money; a successful person was one who had power; a successful person was one who had celebrity. And so today we find that many people who are labeled successful are really not people of character. They are people who have material wealth, celebrity, publicity, and so on. So certainly our value system has switched a great deal. And we have seen this affect the business world, WorldCom, Enron. We have seen it in the press. We have seen it in athletics, in the church, and in politics; and so it is quite concerning as to what effect this has on our culture at the present time.
The predominant world view that I noticed today, Mr. Speaker, is something called post-modernism, and what this states, the view of the world being post-modernism, is that there are no moral absolutes. So murder is not absolutely wrong. It depends on the circumstance. There may be cases when this is justified. Adultery is not absolutely wrong. There may be circumstances in which it is okay. Everything is relative. It may be okay to dishonor one’s father and one’s mother. It may be okay to steal or to lie or to do all of the things that have been taboo in societies throughout history.
So we have a system of relativism that leaves our young people with nothing firm to hold on to at the present time; and particularly on the college campus we will find that post-modernism is currently almost 100 percent holding sway in terms of the minds of our young people.
So, Mr. Speaker, in view of the family breakdown, the decline in our culture and shifting values, it is an extremely difficult time for our children. We are asking them to weave their way through a minefield littered with alcohol and drug abuse, harmful video games, music, TV, movies, promiscuity games, violent behavior, and broken homes; and we are asking them to do this with little or no parental guidance in an ever-shifting value system.
So it is a very difficult time, and I think we need to pay very close attention to these changes in our family, to these changes in our environment. And as de Toqueville said, he made an observation that I thought was rather astute a couple hundred years ago. He said:
“America is great because America is good,” and what he was doing was he was referring to the large number of churches, civic clubs, youth groups, and individuals who reach out and help others. This was somewhat unique to the United States at that time that we would help those who were less able to help themselves, and we had all of the different groups who were reaching out, and he had not noticed that in Europe. He said this is really the key to America’s greatness. So he was referring to the inherent decency of the American people. He was referring to the strong moral and spiritual underpinning of the Nation. He was referring to the basic American ethic: “Do unto to others as you would have them do unto you.” So I think the important thing to remember, that these observations were made 200 years ago, and I suppose the corollary to his observation would be this: if America is no longer good, then America may no longer be great.
