A report has shown that 25% of teenage girls have a sexually transmitted disease. Surprised? We shouldn’t be. After it was learned that Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, had been going to prostitutes for the past six or ten years, Alan Dershowitz, his former professor at Harvard, came to the governor’s defense. “I feel terrible for Eliot and his family,” Dershowitz said. “But I feel that this was a story that we have to put in perspective. Big deal. Married man goes to prostitute. In Europe, this wouldn’t even make the back pages of the newspaper.”
Those nurtured on the radicalism of the 1960s have been described as the “destructive generation.” Doses of “free love” and “free sex” were passed around as easily as a shared marijuana cigarette. “If you can’t be with the one you love,” as a line from a Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song goes, “then love the one you’re with” summed up the attitudes of many during this decade of discontent. There was a concerted, self-conscious effort to break from the past, to throw off the worn out faith of the fathers.
The new generation saw the hypocrisy of the nurturing generation that preceded it. The fathers no longer believed the older faith. Why should the “destructive generation” play the game? Instead of breaking free of the hypocrisy, the “destructive generation” tried to break free of the only cohesion that kept the older generation from self