Since 1980 the number of case of oropharyngeal cancers have increased by sixty percent. Fifteen hundred deaths per year are caused by this disease transmitted by oral sex. Teen pregnancies are up for the first time since 1991. It has been glamorized by a spate of high profile teen pregnancies. One in five tenth grade students admit to having five or more alcoholic drinks. One in five high school students use some form of illicit drugs. In 2005, 47% of the high school students admitted to having sex. Forty million Americans are victimized and of these the 12 to 19 year olds are most frequently the victims. Added to this ugly statistical montage is the number of children being forced into prostitution in this country.

Religious types will blame the loss of faith in the divine; social workers will point to the number of single-parent families and the phenomena of the latch-key kids. Moralists will point their fingers at the sexual and violent portrayals on television. Social critics will shake their heads over the massive use of the internet.

Whether one wants to believe it or not, the enveloping of the culture in a mass mind syndrome is to be held accountable for the profound sense of defeatism, apathy, cultism, and alcohol and drug abuse in this country. It has led to the herd mentality that allows twenty people watch a group of teen-agers rape a fifteen year old girl for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, it didn’t stop there. They filmed it.

During a post graduate course I was taking via the internet I asked the late Timothy Leary if he felt any responsibility for the number of people who had succumbed to LSD. I won’t repeat his vulgar answer. And had I had the opportunity I would have asked the person who redefined IT if he felt any pangs of guilt for the implication that oral sex was not sex. At some point at some time we must hold an accounting.

Is there an answer? I think so and what I’m about to propose may seem simplistic. Hope lies in the fact that the human mind is, by its very nature, creative. Thoughts wander in and out at will and are generally uninvited. It is part of the human will. Vicktor Frankl called it human spirit. It is indefatigable! The novelist Thorton Wilder holds out the other part of this answer in his The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In it, we are told the bridge is love. I add, the love of knowledge, the love of others, and the love of ourselves.

Norman W. Wilson, Ph.D.