If space permitted we might outline one of the sorrows of society in the extensive human addiction to drugs. Addiction usually relates to negative influence found in liquids like alcohol; vapors like cigarettes, or marijuana, or the more extensive narcotics; injections of various drugs directly into the blood stream. There is also the misuse of normal physical functions like eating so addiction to food, or sex so to seek expression in any manner, or even in ways to form an ideal appearance. We even have excesses to addiction in religion that can lead to terrorism. We now include helpful prescription drugs that have become addictive and life threatening. Records preserve gruesome horror stories, China was cursed by the widespread use of opium. Opium dens were common: robbing the addicts of decency for their lives, solidarity for their families, and escape from constructive life and work. Addiction costs to society are incalculable. Millions of persons are kept in a perpetual state of poverty and ill health. Alcohol addiction of men in America rose sharply after the Civil War, and led to the saloon era, increase in crime and poverty, breakdown in families, and decline in society. Problems in families became so great that women launched the massive movement that ultimately gained the prohibition law amending the Constitution of the United States. It was repealed about 12 years later, permitting the government to become a civic approval force in an addictive product. I remember well the day the law was repealed. The former saloon, deplored by President Franklin Roosevelt in announcing the legal return of alcoholic beverages, simply became bars. Much of the prostitution, crimes of violence/murder during the prohibition period often occurred near violation sites, or when troubled and drunken persons left parties featuring moonshine alcohol. The claim that prohibition had led to crime and murder so to justify repeal of prohibition, usually related to those persons who did not evaluate the matter fully. Resulting problems have more than matched those of prohibition by the number of persons now killed by drunken drivers, male and female. Abuses of person and family, cost of policing, loss of work and income, and other negatives made repeal a turn from limited crime to the vast losses found in the general society. (The famous Valentine’s Day Murder in Chicago late in the prohibition period took the lives of criminals by criminals – much preferred over civil immorality of the stupid over the innocent.)
Society has not learned, and doesn’t take time to learn what is available in reducing addiction that is so devastating to the good (dignified) life available to earth populations. Parenting often fails in value orientation and modeling the ordered life that nature demands of us if we are to gain its bounty. Values are neglected by many educational institutions in the underlying excuse that they belong to religion, or some community evolution, or even in the individual – as long as the individual does not physically attack another individual. All attacks on individuals are not visibly physical, and values can be sifted out through the proofs that they work, even if we deny the source of them. Values, when we disagree with them, are rejected as religious, and we believe in the separation between church and state. God offers moderation as a value for us in health and daily life. It belongs to give us self-control and preserve our dignity.
To disappointing degrees, even Christians may have withdrawn from the vigorous practice of biblical values as a factor in the general society. Culture is influenced by what has become the permissive context, the influence of the media approach that became strong in the twentieth century through the Hollywood culture led by actors, literati and entrepreneurs, and made entrancing through media coverage. Values were found in the flow of money, in the physical attractiveness of persons, in the writers of exciting (adult) experience, and the mystery that appeals to the younger generations to feed energies and passions. The lure of wisdom, a sense of devotion, and the beauty of wholesomeness were turned into negatives in the goody two-shoes negatives that treated virtue as a naïve belief about a developing people. It has led to secularism and a prevailing temptation to self-decline for less mature members of society. With proper models from parents, education, and God’s help we can succeed as joyful dignity. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020