This weekend, my alma mater is as quiet and peaceful as a whitewashed tomb.
Just two weeks ago, I heard the news that the State University of New York at Brockport had banned smoking anywhere on campus, even outdoors, save for a few tiny ghettos. Anyone daring to suggest such a ban would have been immediately laughed off back when my classmates attended the college and if the administration had tried to enforce it, you can be certain there would have been sit-ins making the news. Had it been tried in the early ‘70s, there would have been a full-scale riot. Yet this weekend no beer trucks were brought in to celebrate the occupation of the administration building, there was no vast demonstration outside Mortimer Hall and no march on the Seymour Student Union. And that is why the New Prohibition sweeping the country will eventually succeed in depriving all of America of its most basic personal liberties.
What has occurred in Brockport since the Vietnam War protests is a microcosm of how the civil rights of the entire nation have been gradually whittled down since the ‘70s. Prior to the Vietnam War, most colleges believed they had in loco parentis rights to supervise their adult students like children and routinely set curfews, regulated how the sexes mixed and otherwise infringed on their rights. All of that was swept away in the ferment of the ‘60s, which peaked in the 1970 nationwide student strike to protest the shootings of 4 Kent State students in an anti-war protest. SUNY Brockport was among the numberless campuses that was shut down, as even the professors joined with the students in teach-ins against the war.
This was the height of student activism in both Brockport and America as a whole, which dissipated when the main issue, our genocidal war in Vietnam, was brought to an end. The students of my parents’ generation drastically changed campus life by sweeping away the concept of in loco parentis and establishing such institutions as co-ed dorms, but in the early ‘80s, a sustained movement to chip away at these rights began. In the year before I began attending Brockport, beer trucks were routinely brought on campus during Senior Week, but this was among the first rights whittled away by the administration. The next to go, as I reported on for The Stylus, the student paper was bottled beer, which was banned from the dorms. In 1988, the college claimed the right to prevent underage drinkers from possessing alcohol in their own dorms, promising light enforcement at first. Just a couple of years prior, the drinking age in most states including New York was 18, which was raised step-by-step to 19 and then 21; during the Vietnam War, students had demanded a lowering of the age from 21 on the solid grounds that they shouldn’t have to fight and die for a country that wouldn’t even allow them to drink.
The students coming of age in the mid-‘80s believed most of the same arguments but didn’t have the will to fight back in sufficient numbers, so powers that be kept pushing at every level of government to rein them in further. Decades later, they’re still pushing and still succeeding. Their creeping Prohibition has been wildly successful in achieving what the Prohibition activists of the ‘20s utterly failed to do with their sudden, shocking bans: they have succeeded in essentially uprooting the entire bar culture that had once been such a colorful part of American working class life. Rather than trying to behead the bar scene in one fell swoop, they have snuck up like cowardly jackals, nibbling away one limb after another through such sly measures as gradually increases in taxes and imposing unreasonable legal burdens on bar owners and other sellers of alcohol. The same logic has also been applied indiscriminately to illicit drugs, regardless of the wide variation in the levels of harm they do, through employer-mandated drug testings. A few short decades ago, the consensus was that it was none of an employer’s business what their workers did when they weren’t on the clock; if they wanted to smoke pot, they had just better not do it on the job. Since then, court decisions upholding the legality of drug testing have essentially made it possible for employers to monitor the private lives of their workers.
The same strategy of gradually whittling away rights has also been applied towards smoking, with the same spectacularly successful results. It began with regulations on tobacco advertising and sensible Surgeon’s General’s warnings on cigarette packs, which were sensible because they gave smokers more information rather than taking away their rights. In the ‘80s, however, the anti-tobacco lobby crossed the line by placing real burdens on smokers themselves, beginning with gradual increases in taxes that haven’t stopped to this day. At this point, many colleges like Brockport had sensible rules governing tobacco that were not discriminatory, yet still helped non-smokers avoid unwanted second-hand smoke. For example, smoking was only allowed in a couple of small sections of the college library and campus restaurants, while students had to specifically request dorm room that allowed smoking if they wanted to light up in their rooms. During cold weather, some of these rules were skirted by bringing ashtrays into the foyers inside classroom buildings, but I never heard a single non-smoker complain – until a disturbing incident, just before I finished graduate school. As I was smoking in a foyer, a faculty member without a single hair out of place stormed in out of the blizzard and had a mental meltdown in front of me. Although it would have taken him just three or four steps to get from the outer doors to the inner ones that insulated the cold foyer and my smoke from the hallways and classrooms, he stopped to scream some gibberish and threw the heavy floor-standing ashtray out the front door. I laughed at the guy then promptly put it back where it was, then finished my cigarette as he went apoplectic. The faculty member wasn’t an asthmatic ready to drop dead from my smoke, which he would not have even smelled had he not stopped to yell at me. I could see in his eyes that he was offended not by the smoke, but at the sight of me, as a representative of a class of people called smokers that he despised. He regarded me as unclean. This was not the first man I had ever met who was a little too disturbinglyclean, thanks to spending too much time in an Ivory Tower instead of getting his hands dirty, but it was the first example of mental illness I had witnessed from excessive anti-smoking propaganda. The really shocking thing was the degree to which the rest of the country would succumb to the same fanatical illness, as smokers were taxed out of existence and driven into ghettos like parking lot corners over the next two decades.
The Mentality of the Pharisees
The fanatic I met in the foyer that snowy day serves as an archetype of the kind of men and women who drive the New Prohibition. They represent a certain very well-defined mentality that explains much of the worst behavior of the upper middle class throughout human history, especially in modern America and Britain, which have been socially engineered by such people for generations. One of the earliest examples of this mentality can be found in the ancient Brahmin caste of India, a wealthy, aristocratic set that had to invent a class of “Untouchables” they could regard as unclean. The clearest definition, however, comes from the Bible, where they are known as the Pharisees. In the modern lexicon, terms like Pharisee and “hypocrite” have been robbed of most of their meaning, having been reduced to merely failing to practice what one preaches. In truth, the New Testament gives us a very detailed profile of the Pharisees, who fought Jesus at each and every turn until they eventually succeeded in killing him. They refused to eat with a certain class of people and refused to even touch them[1] and were more concerned with washing their hands before eating than with loving their own parents, because bodily cleanliness was more important to them than justice or love.[2] The same fastidiousness about appearance was evident in their excessive emphasis on ceremonial aspects of religion.[3] Likewise, in order to appear important and holy to others, they “dressed for success”[4] and said solemn, complicated prayers publicly.[5] Religion, to them, was a means of social advancement.[6] Even though they labored to make converts, they received no credit for it, because they “make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.’”[7] Nor did they receive credit for fasting, because they did it to make themselves look holy.[8] Because they used God as a tool for social advancement, they were ond of telling people to pipe down when they praised him too loudly.[9] Popularity was their main objective, which is why they used their positions to get what they loved most, “to be greeted in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets.”[10] Likewise, even their attempts to do good works were tainted by arrogance[11] and their acts of charity were done out of the wrong motives, for exactly the same reasons as those of modern philanthropists.[12] In actuality, like the capitalist class of our time, they were worshippers of money who devised legal means to steal the homes of widows.[13]They also shared some other characteristics that are not germaine to this particular discussion, but will be in the future when I go into more depth on the Pharisees in future columns, such as the great deal of importance on vows[14] and pride in their bloodlines.[15] The Pharisees approved of divorce (against the prohibitions of Jesus)[16] and condemned sexual immorality strongly, although they were secretly guilty of it themselves. Both of these seemingly innocuous facts play surprising roles in the thinking of the New Pharisees.[17] The Pharisees were skeptical of miracles[18] (like much of academia today) and kept asking Jesus for more evidence no matter what he did.[19] They were intelligent, clever arguers who tried to trap Jesus with their speech throughout his ministry[20] but they were not honestly seeking truth, so Jesus didn’t always dignify them with a reply.[21] In fact, despite the fact that this set of people was so admired by the general public, Jesus routinely insulted them worse than John the Baptist, who called them a “brood of vipers.”[22] He said they were the single group of people most responsible for killing the Old Testament prophets,[23] called them “blind guides” [24] and other such names to their faces, and repeatedly gave them other warnings like this: “‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.’ ”[25] The danger of the kind of spiritual pride they represented is so severe that he warned that they would suffer God’s worst punishment.[26] We must be better than them, because they would not make it into Heaven despite all of their show of religion.[27] When they appealed to brotherhood on the grounds that Abraham was their common father, Jesus gave them his worst insult: “Your father is the Devil.”[28]
Their father was the brightest of all angels. His first error was to believe that his gifts made him an inborn superiority to everyone else, so that his gifts became a weapon to separate himself from other angels and men, and eventually from God. Likewise, the whole point of the Pharisees, both old and new, is to signify their separateness from everyone else. Everything is their lives is a means to that end of serving their twin gods of pride and avarice – even religion, which became a diabolical weapon of hate to separate men from each other. In the days of Jesus, the Pharisees and their closest friends, the Scribes, came from the upper crust of society and upper middle class professionals, particularly the bourgeoisie, the lawyers and the intelligentsia. The same class of people is at the greatest risk of falling into the same spiritual trap today. Think of how puffed up with pride the average lawyer, large business owner, Wall Street investor, politician, professor, bureaucrat and clergyman is today and watch for a startling number of overlapping characteristics. Some of them are explicitly religious, in the sense that they go to a church, while others have secular religions they don’t recognize, such as the worship of science and its heroes, but their behavior is largely the same. With a few exceptions that are becoming distressingly rarer all the time in our degenerate age, they all fit a common profile. They are lovers of money who treat capitalism as a religion; they are self-righteous, rather than being indignant at the suffering injustice causes. For the purposes of our discussion, the characteristics that identify them most accurately are their sickening fastidiousness in matters of appearance, for they never have a hair out of place, which fits in with their emphasis on external cleanliness and sometimes an emphasis on ceremonialism. Like the chief enemies of Jesus, the New Pharisees are clean-cut, well-off and obsessed with health, which makes it harder for the ordinary people to spot the evil in their hearts and deeds. As Malachi Martin, the late, great chief exorcist in America once said, Satan is very urbane – just like these men, who are his sons. Much of what goes on in the news in Western civilization today originates with this oppressive class, including the misbehavior of the so-called Christian Coalition and the rest of the Republican Right. Everything they do, from accumulating wealth to striving for recognition in their professions, comes from a need to separate themselves from everyone else. In order to retain the false air of sanctity they demand, they need a class of Untouchables to serve in the same role as the ostracized “sinners” they accused Jesus of eating and drinking with. Since they are hypocrites who dislike authentic justice, they can’t actually differentiate themselves from everyone else through real sins, especially the ones they make money from, so they point at things that aren’t sinful at all and exaggerate their potential for evil; in essence, they substitute tastes for morals. They are still straining at gnats and swallowing camels in our day, although the objects of their finger-wagging have changed. One of the symptoms of this is the perversion of the environmental movement, by making “green lifestyles” into a matter of snobbery – so that ordinary people end up looking down on their neighbors for how much exhaust their vehicle puts out, instead of being angry with them for a real reason, like murdering their unborn children through abortion. The “clean lifestyle” they are trying to promote through such measures as anti-smoking laws is a related symptom of this.
There are several dead giveaways to their true motivations, including their usual strategy of falling back on economic reasons, since they are lovers of money. When pressed, they will cite the amount of money that smoking or drinking or whatever costs the state each year, without any recognition of their own guilt in bringing that dependence on the state about. If they had been prosecuted for using such immoral means of getting rich as overcharging customers, underpaying workers, applying monopoly power in the marketplace, hoarding the means of production and usury (as well as buying off legislators for generations to make it all happen) then ordinary folks would never have to fall back on Big Government and the state would have no say in our care. This kind of predatory capitalism is most evident today in the health care system, which is why it is a mess; overcharging by hospitals, pharmaceutical giants, insurance companies and ordinary rank-and-file doctors is what is causing the insolvency of the modern health system, not an increase in smoking or drinking-related illnesses. Both the anti-smoking fanaticism and the introduction of predatory capitalism into the health care field are both symptomatic of a broader moral crisis in the medical field as a whole. Many of the people who staff it are among the class of people prone to Pharisaical thinking. “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger,”[29] which is why for the past generation they have been piling up unreasonable legal responsibilities on bar owners and cashiers who sell alcohol and crushing the working classes under ridiculous taxation for diversions like smoking. Keep in mind that to rich men, the cost per pack matters nothing, but to the poor and middle class it is a crushing burden. This kind of regressive taxation lines the pockets of these lovers of money by allowing them to cut income taxes for the wealthiest, thereby shifting the tax burden onto ordinary folks in yet another clever way.
Among the most condescending giveaways is the typical rebuttal that it is being done for “the good” of smokers and drinkers. Just as the charity given by the old Pharisees was condenscending because it meant to confirm the inferior status of the recipient, so too does their crusade confirm the gulf between themselves and the untouchables beneath them. Instead of passing along knowledge to a fellow man as a an equal, what they are really saying is,”Look at how kind I am, helping these stupid and ignorant people beneath me.” Actually, it is they themselves who are following demonstrably stupid falsehoods, whereas real wisdom is still more to be found in the common people beneath them. There is of course overwhelming evidence that smoking can cause dangerous health problems; I am living proof of that, having been diagnosed with mild emphysema at a very young age, thanks to too many years of being an archetypal chain-smoking reporter. I have lost dear relatives from smoking and may lose more in the future. To date, however, I have yet to lose one to second-hand smoke. I have about as much training in evaluating medical studies as people working in the health field, but unlike a frightening number of the doctors and other specialists I have met personally, I actually read them. The research done on the dangers of second-hand smoke is not only overblown, but demonstrably stupid. Anyone with common sense, unlike many of our overeducated but unwise intelligentsia, can understand why, because such studies make second-hand smoke seem more dangerous than actual smoking. If that were true, it would make sense for those who frequently encounter second-hand smoke to start puffing away themselves, in order to reduce their risk. As novelist Anatole France once said, “If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” Likewise, if a thousand well-dressed, articulate, condescending people with degrees say a foolish thing, it is still foolish. A disturbing amount of today’s medical research is logically flawed - particularly studies of medications that pharmaceutical companies earn substantial income from – but this crosses the line into crackpot junk science. It is crackpot junk science that serves a preconceived notion for a class of people with an axe to grind. The mentality of the Pharisees has been a problem throughout the history of our civilization, such as in early Protestant times with the snooty Puritans, as well as in the years leading up to Prohibition. There was an anti-smoking lobby way back then, one that appealed many to the same class of people. Long before there was any hard scientific research about the health effects of smoking, people could see the evidence with their own eyes, but a certain group of people wanted to treat it as a dirty sin, not just the unhealthy habit everyone knew it to be. The really frightening thing is that they remained a fringe movement, until such time as a generation appeared that was weak enough to swallow their arguments. The real reason that smokers are being confined to ever-shrinking ghettos, smoking out in frigid corners of parking lots, has nothing at all to do with any credible danger from second-hand smoke, which isn’t going to give non-smokers instant heart attacks if they happen to walk by them outdoors. There is a clear and logical explanation for this seemingly ridiculous response; the New Pharisees need someone to demonize, particularly over matters of taste and health that aren’t sinful at all, while simultaneously condescending to them, like the Pharisees of old. The disturbing aspect of the whole debate is that large numbers of people are so gullible that they dutifully go along with the repression while simultaneously swallowing the shallow excuses concocted for it.
Temperance vs. Tee-Totaling
I am certain at this point, critics will be thinking of a thousand and one bona fide statistics on reductions in lung cancer rates, liver transplants and DWI accidents, and you’re preaching to the converted, because I’ve probably lost more friends and relatives in DWIs than many of the readers. Such crticisms miss the whole point, that heavy-handed prohibition of these gifts is not a substitute for temperance, which has to be learned. Yes, I said gifts in reference to alcohol and tobacco, because the ordinary use of them is not evil in the slightest way; all of the evil side effects of cigarettes and alcohol, as well as anything else in life, come from the abuse of them. They are not “guilty pleasures,” because only the inordinate use of them makes produces guilt. As my favorite 20th Century philosopher, G.K. Chesterton, once said, the Prohibition movement of his day was prone to a sort of reverse idolatry, in which they feared false devils rather than worshipping false gods; likewise, in our day, cigarettes are treated as the enemy, when the vice of intemperance is the real problem. We are up against a spiritual problem, not physical one. As Jesus once said, there is some good and more evil in alcohol, but the Prohibitionists want to throw out the good as well. I surmise that there is a great deal more evil in cigarettes and a great deal less good, simply because nicotine doesn’t produce any joy commensurate with the greater health risks in tobacco; it never gets you high, it only makes you feel what you considered normal before you became addicted. The proportion of people who can smoke without getting addicted is proportionally much smaller than those who can drink without becoming drunks, but they do exist, which is why tobacco use shouldn’t be outlawed. It is possible for some people to exercise temperance in smoking, but it is not possible for anyone to exercise temperance in hard narcotics, which is why cocaine and heroin must always remain illegal. Some people are capable of drinking routinely without falling into addiction or acting in anti-social ways, but that is never possible with hard drugs; some people can maintain their balance with alcohol, but trying to do so with crack and smack is like walking on a razor blade. Sooner or later, everyone who does them without exception becomes moral monsters who are dangerous to everyone around them. This is the clearest sign of intemperance, which is tied to the effect it has on the consumer, not on the sheer numerical amount that they consume. Senseless Prohibitionists like to pin the alcoholic label on anyone who drinks a certain amount per day (an ever-shrinking amount, for they always lower the barrier; if you drink four glasses of wine in one weekend, their magic number will decrease to three) and cite stats on the steady decline of alcohol consumption in the U.S. over the last 100 years as evidence of progress. Our ancestors could drink several orders of magnitude more than we can today, but retained more common sense. What makes a person an alcoholic is how they behave when they drink, which varies considerably from person to person, just as average tolerance does. Some people can’t drink at all without become violent; others can drink much more than I can without having any ill effects to their health or anyone else’s. Some people can smoke in moderation, while I cannot, which is why I can never touch another cigarette again, but I’m not going to demand that everyone else give up smoking because of my own failures. Because the individual response is so varied, it must be left up to the drinker or the smoker to decide if they are being intermperate or not, rather than a class of arrogant Prohibitionists. Let me elucidate a principle here: people should only be forcibly restrained by law in matters of eating and drinking only if what they’re doing carries a very strong risk of doing injury to others, or immediately to one’s self, such as consuming Drano or another substance that could induce suicide. That is why cigarettes and alcohol ought to be legal and regulated, but not laden with regressive taxes that hurt everyone but the rich. That is why cocaine and heroin ought to remain illegal while a fathomable case can be made for legalization of marijuana. It is also why such true evils as abortion, adultery, divorce, contraception and many others that do real damage to society ought to be illegal as well.
We are swallowing camels like those while straining out gnats like tobacco intemperance and carbon fuels precisely because our society is more degenerate than before, not less. When I learned to walk, everyone smoked but abortion was illegal and rare; today, it is illegal for you to smoke a cigarette in a hospital parking lot, but you can kill your unborn children behind the walls of the same hospital and no one can touch you. If you turn back the clock a ways, it is surprising how far we’ve come in such a short time, because we’re being slowly boiled like frogs. The creeping Prohibition began in my teenage years, when the drinking age was originally 18, my hometown had 10 bars that were full almost every night of the week and my high school had an outdoor smoking area for students, but there was quite a bit more temperance: hard drugs like crack and smack were vanishingly rare even among the hard core burnouts I knew, and the bars were not simply meat markets like today. Not long after the New Prohibition began, a Brockport professor wrote in to The Stylus criticizing the students for being spoiled and apathetic, since they complained loudly about not being allowed to have beer trucks on campus, but wouldn’t go out and protest against repression like the students in South Korea and South Africa. I agreed with that sentiment to an extent back then, since our generation could have brought the Reagan Administration’s genocidal wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala to a halt if we’d marched like our parents did against the Vietnam War. These days, I would like to see America’s college students take care of the genocide going on right under our noses by marching down to their local abortion clinics and tearing them down brick by brick. That professor missed a subtle point though, in that the college’s restrictions on such things as a alcohol and diet are very important because they are such small things. If the administration can dictate the diets of the students, or the government can dictate what the general public eats and drinks, they will never put up with them marching for a truly virtuous and thereby truly threatening cause. And if the students will put up with having their own lives supervised and their own pleasures taken away, they’re never going to stand up for someone else’s. No generation that is terrified of being caught smoking a cigarette in public is going to be brave enough to throw Molotov cocktails at tanks, which you can be sure would be out on the streets if anyone tried to change America for the better like our ancestors in the Progressive Era and the ‘60s. If they won’t march for their own liberty, they’re not going to march for someone else’s.
When the Best Lack All Conviction
Prohibition failed because of the courageous resistance of the mass of ordinary Americans, who smuggled liquor and drank their fill at illegal speakeasies from coast to coast. Such people as the New Pharisees have been a perennial threat for generations, but the difference is that today, perennially rebellious youth is not willing to fight back against them. We have raised something never before seen in history: the very first tame generation of overly programmed kids. I am still puzzled as to why this is, but it may have something to do with them being more outnumbered by adults than anytime in history except in demographic disaters like the Black Death, thanks to a deliberate culling of our own population through abortion since the ‘70s and contraception since the ‘30s. If this is true, then our civilization is doomed to collapse, because the possibility of rebellion to fix the very things preventing rebellion will never be possible. At the moment, a growing proportion of the public in North America and Europe is degenerating to the point that they’ll swallow any explanation for any evil at all. If the Carter Administration had been caught torturting foreigners as a matter of policy the way the Bush Administration was, people would have marched and people would have been indicted; flash forward two decades later and nobody gave a care. The number of evils that are being committed openly, in the public eye, without the public doing a thing about it, is simply shocking. Our leaders are conscious of this, which is why they are openly planning to extend their control even deeper into our lives than any generation of Pharisees before them. Chesterton warned back in the days of Prohibition that the ruling class of capitalists was trying to turn the Western nations into virtual slave pens, in which they would eventually supervise even the diets of their wage slaves and now, that it is at last possible. There are leaders openly working to manipulate health insurance and health care reform efforts to not only give employers a right to supervise the diets of their employees, but to legalize euthanasia, which will be the next Holocaust in Western history after abortion. There are also so-called experts trying to figure out ways to reduce the next false devils on their list, fat consumption and caffeine intake, just as they previously demonized tobacco and alcohol. The modern increase in obesity is a sign of growing intermperance, not of a need for greater government regulation of the working class; it may be a sign of gluttony, but following the same principle I elucidated above, it should be up to each individual to decide if they are eating intemperately or not. Gluttony can be criticized because it is not an act of love; I would not be showing love to my wife if I let myself grow as fat as Orca, since she would have to look at me more than I do. Nevertheless, I know many jolly fat people who I love and respect as much as some of the smokers and hard drinkers I know, because their faults are minor compared to those of the yuppies who want to control their diets for them.
The problem with our tame generation is not that what it takes in through its stomach, but what it absorbs into its heart and soul. Today we’ll swallow any argument without question, which is why Reaganomics could coexist with abortion, why torture and homosexual marriage are both tolerated today and why junk science like the second-hand smoke studies (another example is a recent study by Lancet claiming alcohol is as destrutctive as heroin or cocaine) is taken hook, line and sinker. The one thing people will march for now is their mortal sins, as long as the word “freedom” is attached to the rhetoric. In his famous poem The Second Coming, Yeats once warned of a time, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” One cannot help but think of the latter group when listening to the apostles of Hate Radio blather on, foaming at the mouth about “liberals,” or when seeing homosexuals march in Gay Pride Parades for the right to destroy marriage. I cannot help but think that the best lack conviction when I hear so many people murmuring about America’s decline, but fewer people marching for ancient causes in the streets. Perhaps that is because there are fewer people, period, thanks to the culling from abortion, which has claimed 47 million American lives and 1 billion worldwide in just a few decades. Those fortunate enough to survive that fate aren’t marching either though. In fact, they’re not even marching for such low causes as beer.
That is why Brockport was a quiet ghost town the last time I visited there a number of years ago with some alumni friends. One of them had smoked pot under an awning at the college president’s back yard during a rain storm with a friend, but there was no evidence of any such bravery on display now. The buildings still stood and were more polished than ever, but it was a whitewashed tomb that produced no wisdom and no happiness, judging from the emptiness of the bars. Some of the gigantic taverns that used to be standing room only every night of the week were completely closed down even though school was in session, so we had to hold our gathering at a townie bar. On the other hand, the campus has a reputation for being the STD capital of the area, which was never true in my day despite all of the normal college promiscuity; you can’t smoke a cigarette on campus, but apparently it is easier to indulge in adultery than ever before. These two apparently inconsistent facts boil down to one culprit a draining away of virtue and wisdom. There are probably a lot of good things about the new Brockport I’m overlooking, since I personally admire the students I know there and the professors that have been teaching there since I was a student, but there is something clearly very wrong that you wouldn’t notice without looking back in time. I’m not singling Brockport out, because it is merely a microcosm of a terrible trend washing across the whole nation. The same thing has occurred at St. John Fisher, whose students used to pack the East Rochester bars all week long. When I bike through the campus, sometimes even early on Friday nights, there’s little sign of life. These are just two tiny battlefronts in a spiritual war going on across the breadth of Western civilization, from Vladivostok to Paris to San Francisco. In most of these places, you can get arrested for not mowing your lawn, but no one can touch you if you kill your unborn child; our society is prettier on the outside than ever before, but like the hearts of the Pharisees in our ruling class, it is full of dead men’s bones, or more accurately dead children’s bones. Because we have allowed ourselves to be governed by the Pharisees, our whole civilization is becoming one giant white-washed tomb. It is better to take the risks of love handles, hangovers and lung cancer that come with intemperance than to continue to allow these blind guides to slowly remake our world into a carefully manicured, peaceful, quiet, cold, pretty and quite dead mauseoleum.
The writer is a former journalist with a Bachelor’s in journalism and a Master’s in history from the State University of New York at Brockport, with a focus on American foreign policy and specializations in U.S.-Latin American relations and counterinsurgency history. He has worked as a paid foreign policy columnist for several newspapers and has credit towards a doctorate in Latin America history. He is a convert to Catholicism from atheism and has been an avid reader of textbooks on topics ranging from particle physics to psychology to economics since age 9.
[2] Matthew 15:1-20; also see Mark 7:1-23 and Luke 11:36-54.
[3] Matthew 23:23-26. Also refer to Luke 11:36-54.
[4] Luke 20:45-47
[5] Luke 20:45-47; Matthew 6:5-7
[6] John 12:18-19
[7] Matthew 23:14-15
[8] Matthew 6:16-18
[9] Luke 19:37-40
[10] Luke 20:45-47
[11] Matthew 23:5-12
[12] Matthew 6:1-4
[13] Luke 20:45-47
[14] Matthew 23:16-22
[15] Matthew 3:9-10.
[16] Matthew 19:3-9, Mark 10:1-12
[17] John 8:1-20
[18] Matthew 9:34
[19] Matthew 12:38-42. Also see Mark 8:11-12.
[20] Matthew 22:15-22. The same incident is also related in Mark 12:13-17 and Luke 20:20-26.
[21] Matthew 21:23-27
[22] Matthew 3:7-8
[23] Matthew 23:29-36; see also Luke 11:36-54.
[24] Matthew 22:15-22; Matthew 23:1-29; Matthew 15:1-20; Matthew 23:24
[25] Matthew 23:27-28
[26] Luke 20:45-47
[27] Matthew 5:19-21
[28] John 8:39-47
[29] Matthew 23:1-5
