Institutions are letting our culture down

It's difficult to understand today's emerging alternative culture, where bad behaviors are often encouraged, promoted and sometimes even celebrated; the end justifies the means; chromosomes don't define gender; 2+2 has more than one correct answer; and Dr. Suess has left the building. This is a bridge too far for us older folks. There is emerging fear that not accepting and embracing these new norms gets us "canceled" or deemed irrelevant by social elite types.

Who is shaping this new culture? First on the list are a growing number major print and broadcast media outlets who simply under report major stories that oppose their narrative and conflict with their collective views. Next, and more concerning are the private, unregulated social media platform juggernauts like Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, that methodically suppress competing views through cancellation. They exercise complete control over their platform content without impunity. This is legal but wrong.

Our education system is another giant culture shaper. Dwindling are the days where the Socratic method of questioning unlocked the answers we sought in all fields of study. Most educational institutions were marketplaces of ideas with highways of competing views of all stripes. Today these highways are becoming one-way streets where competing ideas are driven out by protests, shaming, threats, and sometimes even violence.

With increasing trepidation over saying the wrong thing for fear of getting canceled or branded as some monster type, the human products of this limited education system will never be prepared for tomorrow's challenges.

If there were only a few books left on earth to guide our path, two of my picks would be the fairy tales "Animal Farm" and "The Emperor's New Clothes." The lessons in these fables show uncanny similarities to what is in front of our very eyes today.

Lewis Landry

Mundelein