During the first half of the last century, a childhood ended as early as eleven, when many children were forced to toil for endless hours in fields in order to provide for themselves a means to make it in the world. Discipline was harsh, often times in the form of being paddled until red welts appeared, and could also come in the form of a refusal to be served meals. Parents held strict control over their children's lives, but they were also considered friends, as despite the wounds of bad behavior, their children were also aware that their parents would do anything to give them a better life.

Commanding discipline was a parent's only tool to keep their children in line as the innocence of culture finally began to dwindle into an age of dissent and an unwillingness to participate took hold over our culture just as a storm cloud would take away the sunshine from the waving grass in a plain. As the century drew to a close, discipline finally began to disappear as special interest groups and so-called professionals in psychiatry began to call for the dismissal of discipline as the spanking of a child was found to be, in their eyes, the reason for a lack of mental acuity and maturity. As culture seemingly descended to a point where the word 'bad' actually began to mean that something was 'good', and where people like Marilyn Manson, whose own name is derived from that of a drug user who overdosed and that of a serial killer, a brand of which has never been seen since, began to take over our culture and its resident population.

Childhood now is legally considered to stretch to the age of eighteen, but where some parents lacked the spine to compete with their children's pop culture idols, others stepped in to educate them about right and wrong. Schools were redesigned in the nineteen eighties and into the nineteen nineties to reeducate and to reevaluate the effects that society has, and the pressures it causes, on the now labeled susceptible children who no longer have the ability to think for themselves. They tried to teach that drugs were wrong, yet usage barely even leveled off, and even as they taught abstinence, the pregnancy rate in teenage girls skyrocketed to new highs, bringing about a new generation of children whom, at the age of thirteen, will have moms barely twice their age. Even at the age of twenty, some 'kids' still depend on their parents for a buck when time comes to pay the bills, and even worse, many sit idly by while life passes them up, opportunities left to seize, rot and decay until they leave a bad taste even in the mouth of any hardened man.

Who is to blame for this dastardly decline in society? Some believe it is the parents who just stopped caring, yet I still see many who remain strict believers in discipline and the perfect picture of maturity. Could it be the interest groups which preach about the benefits of not spanking your child or, could it be time itself, ravaging upon us an era of moral decline, which is responsible for this now unsavory flavor to life? Perhaps another possibility, one far more frightening to the eye, is that technology itself has poisoned us; the integrated circuit which has wrought forth the ability to listen to evil music, to view previously highly guarded, socially unacceptable, materials, and the ability to keep secret those dangerous habits which I despise most of all, the ones which gnaw deeply at my gut; it is the lack of caring each of us shows for the more than six billion human lives on this earth, each of which is considered individually sacred, yet is shunned when they are placed in a group for us to study.

At what point did children today stop talking to their parents? Friendships which were important to a child in order to keep them on the right, moral path, have disintegrated to the point where friendships now bring forth the peer pressure to experiment with drugs and alcohol. Can we truly believe that in not talking to our parents, circumstances notwithstanding, that it is acceptable to go through life without ever leaning on ones parents for advice? Would this constitute a more grievous demise in our society today?

Social decline began when no longer did the children depend on themselves to make decisions, but began to look at their peers as the only ones to offer them suggestions on life. A hundred years ago, a child of thirteen could make it in the world because they knew what hard work was, and they knew that in working hard, they could find their voice. Today, a child of thirteen is considered helpless, and is excused for whatever troubles their actions incur. It saddens and disgusts me that even as justice in the world calls for accountability from the schools, it is not the children who are being held accountable, it is the schools that cannot perform, it is the parents who cannot intervene, and it is the system itself which has failed all of us. Instead of giving them the 'F', give it to our children, because it is they who have failed us, it is they who have stopped caring, and it is they who will be societies undoing.