With freedom comes responsibility.
On this July 4, 2007, responsibility seems in scant supply.
Increasingly, America's popular culture is a spectacle of excessive, unruly vulgarity. Personal public behavior is recklessly immodest, salacious, obscene and raunchy.
Americans are assaulted daily with nearly inescapable vulgar and lewd language at sports events, on television, in film and broadcast talk programs, and in hip-hop music. "Trash talk" is a renowned U.S. idiom—the language of men and women unable to express themselves intelligently who resort to the gutter. "Road rage" and its vulgar hand gestures are sleazy cousins to inept trash-talkers.
Privacy is no longer respected. Nosy voyeurs buy devices that eavesdrop on private conversations and videotape people without their knowledge.
Young women apparently born into homes without codes of self-respect flash their nude bodies in "Girls Gone Wild" videotapes that are sold to millions.
Celebrity sex acts on video-for-sale are old hat.
But it's all legal in our free nation.
Best-selling authors on the political left and right bastardize their First Amendment speech freedom to wish for the violent deaths of U.S. politicians by name.
Pranksters and self-serving political dirty tricksters exploit gullible Internet users with hoaxes that damage personal reputations and spread fear.
The commercial marketplace is infested with charlatans, con men and medical quacks whose sole purpose is to defraud and embezzle.
The most outrageous abuses of freedoms, however, are in government, where men and women with a pathological greed for power violate the public trust that was the guiding spirit of the Founding Fathers' grand vision for democracy.
Our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, had civility in mind when he said, "I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so his place will be proud of him."
British historian Arnold Toynbee could see the danger in cultures that abandon self-restraint, responsibility and refinement.
"Civilizations die from suicide, not murder," he wrote.
And American clergyman Frank Crane could see the virtues as well as the demands of freedom.
"Responsibility is the thing people dread most of all. Yet it is the one thing in the world that develops us, gives us manhood or womanhood fibre," he said.
All are words worth taking to heart in this age of freedoms run amok.
