The Age of Depression

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The Age of Depression

November 11, 2003 • Ronald L. Dart

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My wife was driving home one afternoon and came up against a sheriff's blockade and a helicopter in the road with its rotors turning. We live in a country subdivision, and this was unusual to say the least. The helicopter was a hospital chopper that had come to load a badly wounded boy. It seems he and a buddy had been drinking that afternoon, and when the other boy's mom got after them, he got out his dad's shotgun and threatened his mother. His friend tried to stop him and so, he shot his friend. And then killed himself. Right in front of his mom.

You read about all this stuff in the papers and see it on television, but it comes home to roost when it is in your neighborhood. Dr. Bernadine Healy, in a recent *US News* magazine told a very similar story. She said: “His death tore through the hearts of his fellow students, parents, and teachers at my daughter's school, all wondering what had spiraled out of control in his young mind and what might have been done to save him.”

I know exactly what she is talking about. What I didn't know was what a terrible change has taken place in the incidence of depression among young people. A study found that the lifetime incidence of depression in a given individual is 10 times higher in kids born in the 60's than it was for kids born about WWI, and I'm sure it's only grown. You can't brush off a ten fold increase in a mental illness as serious as depression. Something has changed, and it is not our genetics. Dr. Martin Seligman spoke of what might be at work here:

I've argued that two factors that have contributed to the epidemic of depression. One is an increasing individualism, a rampant individualism, in which we tend to regard ourselves like children regard themselves as I'm all there is, and depression is, I believe, a disorder of individual failure, an individual helplessness, and if you think you're all there is, you're set up for it. In the past, when we failed, as fail we must, there was spiritual furniture we could fall back on for consolation. Our relationship to God, our patriotism, extended families, community. And systematically in the two generations in which depression has increased so drastically, we've seen a waning of all these spiritual furnitures.

Have we ever. We couldn't have done a better job of pulling the furniture out from under out kids if we had set out to do it. The relationship with God is denied. Love of country is dismissed. The family has been shredded by divorce and indiscriminate sex, on third of all babies born now have no father in the home. And even the community is coming apart. The poor kids have no one to fall back on except themselves and they already know what broken reeds they are. This reminds me of a warning that the apostle Paul gave to his son in the faith, Timothy...

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Living Together

April 8, 2003 • Ronald L. Dart

There is something radically wrong with sex education as it currently exists in this country. It seems as though everyone has completely forgotten that sex is supposed to be an act of love. But perhaps the schools can’t teach love. They are teaching sex without morals because they have no absolute standard of morals. And as a result, they are teaching sex without love. I don’t know who to blame for all this, but whoever it is has set us on a slippery slope to oblivion. I don’t know if the trend can be reversed or not. But if it isn’t, the destruction of the family will ultimately lead to the destruction of society. Our kids have been sold a bill of goods by Hollywood and the music industry, and the schools have done nothing to correct it. How *can* they? They can’t quote the Bible to students. They can’t tell them that there is a Creator who designed man and told him how to build a civil society that will last. They can’t tell the kids that there is an absolute standard of moral behavior. They can’t tell kids that there is such a thing as sin, and it will eventually lead you to the place where you will be running an ad to find a man to help you with your kids. In a way, the problem is not that kids don’t want to marry and have kids and stay married until old age. When you ask them, they say that is exactly what they want. The problem is that they haven’t got *a clue* how to get from here to there. Part of the answer lies in good, solid religious teaching at home and at church. But you also have to overcome the stupidity that is being sold as an alternative lifestyle. Somebody is out there telling young girls that they can have their babies and do just fine as single mothers. It is a *lie*. They will *not* be just fine, and neither will their children. The truth is out there, all over the place, but kids have to be told—and told again and again. I came across an old article in the *City Journal* that presented a truth to me with a clarity I had not been able to explain, even though I knew right from wrong on the issue. The article was titled “How We Mate”, by Barbara Whitehead. Ms. Whitehead was writing about the profound changes that have taken place in mating habits among Americans of all age groups. What struck me in the article was not an argument. It was just a fact. And it wasn’t even a counter-intuitive fact, so I had no trouble accepting it. She wrote about the number of single mothers who think they will do just fine raising their kids by themselves. But she noted that some single mothers have a rude awakening… [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link on this page.]

Controlling Pornography

January 4, 2005 • Ronald L. Dart

Is there really such a thing as sexual addiction? Some professional counselors say there is, and some say there isn’t. I don’t know who is right on this issue, but I have a feeling that people are disagreeing on mere semantics. They are talking past one another, where there really is no substantive disagreement. I will leave the arguments on that to the professionals. But I have to admit that there *is* a real problem in our society with something that looks very much like an addiction to sex. Thanks to the internet, *pornography* is clean out of control. Of all the kids you know between the ages of, say, 11 to 17, how many of them would you say would *accidentally* be exposed to pornography on the internet? The answer: 9 out of 10—*accidentally*. If I point out to you that there are 8,000 new cases of sexually-transmitted diseases among teenagers, every day, would you agree that we have a problem? No? What if I add the hard fact that 20% of ninth graders have slept with four or more partners. Then would you agree that we have a problem? It is true to say that pornography is out of control in our society—and in the world, for that matter. But when we say that, we raise the specter of “control”. If we are to control it, who is the controller—the government? One of the things that is killing us is the way the courts are now interpreting the First Amendment. What is odd about it all is that for 200 years, we lived under the First Amendment and still managed to keep sex away from children. We kept it out of movies, radio, television, print—mostly. What do you suppose was the *overriding social need* that allowed us to interpret the First Amendment in such a way that we could control pornography? And why can’t we do it now? To answer that question, I have to change the subject for a moment. [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link above.]

Free Love

August 5, 2003 • Ronald L. Dart

If you asked 100 people where the expression “Free Love” came from, I doubt you would find more than one person who knows. I surely didn't. I thought it originated back in the 1960s with the flower children. But I was wrong. The term originated in the *18*50s in a religious commune in Oneida, New York. Called the Oneida Community by some and the Oneida Experiment by others, it was an experiment with sexual freedom under *religious* auspices, and quoting scripture for its justification. I'm not sure what sent me looking for this, but I found an article in *Touchstone* magazine by Frederica Mathewes-Green called *The Oneida Experiment: What We Have Discovered About Not-So-Free Love* “Oneida was founded on the principle of ‘Bible Communism.’ Founder John Humphrey Noyes insisted that, under his personally-devised philosophy, there were to be no selfish attachments, no hoarding of love.” Initially, it sounds very strange. How can you hoard love? And how can love be a *selfish* attachment when it is the outgoing giving of oneself to another person? According to Ms. Green, Noyes “had put sexual freedom at the head of his agenda; he was the inventor of the term, ‘free love.’ The Yale Divinity School student and sometime Congregationalist minister believed that ‘complex marriage’ was God’s will, as indicated by the scripture, ‘in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven’ [Mt 22:30].” Now, you may be way ahead of me on this, but it isn't clear to me how a “complex marriage” can be like angels who *don't marry at all*. According to Noyes, “The abolition of sexual exclusiveness is involved in the love-relation required between all believers by the express injunction of Christ and the apostles […] The restoration of true relations between the sexes is a matter second in importance only to the reconciliation of man to God.” As I read more on John Humphrey Noyes, I knew I had to talk to you about it; but I was torn. what is the story really about? Is it about sex? About love? About utopianism? And then I came to a paragraph by Lawrence Foster in an article titled *The Oneida Community Experience and Its Implications for the Present*… [Image credits, if any, may be found by visiting the "View Online" link below.]