You know, we really need a leader that can teach ALL of us to become more confrontational. That’s something our society has lost, to our detriment. Too many apologies from the top.
A hearty AMEN to your post. There was a time when "self policing", that is, enforcing societal norms by the members was more powerful than any other means of producing acceptable behavior. I truly believe it is the critical element in maintaining cultural continuity. It can't be accomplished by wimps.
From a great article that used to pop up from time to time:
Destroying Cultural Continuity The Leftist War On Social Cohesion
The malaise of the West, at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, may be characterized as a lost sense of cultural continuity; a lost sense of community purpose, with community defined as it was traditionally, before a collaborating pseudo-elite of presumptuous intellectual poseurs began a campaign to reorient Mankind into the nightmare of an undifferentiated humanity. With all the commentary on other aspects of our Leftward drift, this condition goes largely unremarked; ignored because of the very contrived social pressures, which originally undermined traditional patterns of community identification. Yet untreated, the disease will likely prove fatal to everything that Conservatives hold sacred. While the illustrations that follow and the suggested response will largely reflect an American perspective, the general concept is equally applicable to many other Nations, similarly beset.
Throughout history, normal men and women have tried to provide for their children; have tried to pass on their insights, values, faith and purpose to their descendants. And, if in their struggle, they were able to accumulate something of material wealth, they expected to pass that on as well. The vehicle for this dynamic and ongoing process was the family; and in the more extended sense, the tribe, nation or race. The true purpose of the tribe or nation was never in the affair of the moment, but in this passing forward, generation by generation, the patrimony--spiritual and material--of a people. It was in this passing forward, that Society obtained its moral purpose.