I watched a few minutes of a beauty/talent pageant the other day on tv.  The contestants were beautiful.  Their hair was perfect, and their  heavy makeup was flawless.  Their outfits looked like they belonged in Las Vegas.  Their actions in addition to their appearance made it clear that they were being successful at being sexually alluring women.  And they were five.

Did the little girls know what they were portraying?  Of course not, they’re FIVE.  It’s not my business what other people do to/with their children, but as an older person, I need to say that a five year old should be five.  Before she’s twenty.  She should play in the mud with sticks, and run, and fall, and scrape her knee and have dolls and color in coloring books, and swing on swings.

Sure, when I was a kid, we’d dress up in our mothers’ clothes and play grown-up.  And it was play, and it was fun, and it ended when something more interesting came along to do, or supper time came.  We did that on rainy days when we couldn’t be outside.  It was play.  There was no competition, and we were not on show like little trophies.  It was not like our job; our job was being children.  We were children.  Until we slowly grew into adults, with the process happening in the time that it should.

So many things are connected that add up to moral decay.

Our sense of lack of personal responsibility.  Where did that go?  So many people are willing to blame somebody for things that go wrong in their world.  But wait!  We can, if we want to, have some control over a lot of that stuff.  I choose to take a lot of that control, and if I screw things up, that’s my responsibility, and my consequences.  When did so many of us forget the concept of consequences for our actions?

More shootings, so many of them mass shootings; that stuff didn’t used to happen.  Now it’s becoming almost routine.  Not long ago in the small town I grew up in, a man allegedly shot his ex-wife, her new boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s mother.  This is a town so small that there are no red lights,  just stop signs.  Growing up there, there were guns, cos the men were hunters.  But nobody ever considered shooting other people.

Children having children.  Used to be that there were some teenagers having kids.  Some.  Now it seems to be just the thing to do.  Those young girls have the power to produce a child, sure, but not the emotional power to know how to parent children and help them to grow up to be healthy, happy, adults.

Drugs, running rampant among all facets of our society.  Why do we feel the need to lose ourselves in those substances that have the great power to destroy our lives?  A city near to me used to be a peaceful place with the regular amount of crime found in a typical big city.  Now there are murders almost every week, most of them drug related.

More ramblings of an old lady who’s dissatisfied with so many parts of life today.  What have we become, and where are we going?   And what are the connections, and what can we do about it?  I’ll have more questions coming about moral decay, cos it scares me.  And maybe I can make some people think, and some might have answers.