With the advent of the Internet, everyone has the ability to disseminate ideas, knowledge, and information with a click of a mouse. Now is when any schmuck with a computer and a fair grasp of grammar can produce his opinion for the perusal of all. They are sometimes reliable, sometimes not.
Yet, this is does not seem to be the most frightening thing. We live in an age when if we see it in print, it must be true.
However, quite a few of these opinions are uninformed at best; ignorant, inflammatory and dangerous at their worst. Still, people latch on to them and take their word as truth.
Some people would argue that professional journalists and their ilk are no better than the aforementioned schmucks are. I do not know that they are completely wrong. Here enters the issue of credibility.
Credibility is a strange word these days, along with its corollary, accountability. In an era when responsibility is relegated to discussions of semantics, when guilt is negotiable and when anyone on our television must be telling the truth, it is no wonder such a takeover is possible.
For example, our past president (guilt and opinion polls aside) has actually gotten the collective consciousness of our country to ask, “What exactly is sex?” If 10 years ago someone had phrased such a question, they would have been laughed at and never taken seriously again.
We are seeing a decline in conventional moral and ethical standards in this country (religion aside). One does not have to be of a religious mind-set to recognize certain ideas such as the improperness, if not wrongfulness, of crimes against another person.
Whether one argues that this is the end of America as we know it or not, it is definitely apparent that we are changing. In a society that looks to its leaders as moral barometers, those positions are sacred. A violation of that trust will cause a conflict with the morality of its citizens.
This is, in essence, a moral vacuum.
Everyone at the height of Clinton’s impeachment wondered, at least once, what “sex” meant and what a “lie” was. America has not recovered from this. Our nation also lost a large portion of its innocence in the `60s with the death of Kennedy and the war in Vietnam.
That generation (or at least part of it) banded together in drug-induced idealism, with the hope that if they tried hard enough, they could make the world a better place.
When that failed, they entered the `70s and `80s and gave birth to our generation. The paranoid, anti-social, pessimistic persons we are today.
With the damage certain persons have done to our ideas of leaders and human beings, we are not banding together. Drugs are meant to help us escape the world in which we exist.
Most of us don’t care if the world becomes a better place, because we have seen enough to know better.
We are self-centered, urban survivalists. We are becoming nations of one, and five, and 15. The more divisions between groups of all kinds, be they along lines of creed, color or religion, the more we separate ourselves.
As we individually seek our identities, we are denying our unified identity.
As we seek to become Caucasians, Latinos, African-Americans and other politically-correct titles, we are insisting on emphasizing our differences. In a country where only difference is emphasized, we can’t have compromise.
Far be it from me to suggest that we are all American. I would get many angry letters about how I am attempting to repress this group and that.
It is true; we are a nation of many kinds, types and colors. Yet, we are all American.
Until we as a nation are able to compromise on the state and relevance of our continued existence, decline is inevitable.
Therefore, with America having no collective identity, it is no wonder that it looks to various media for guidance.
Until we are able to look within ourselves and find standards on which we are willing to stand and for which we take responsibility, we will never have responsibility, accountability or unity.

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