If you were looking for evidence of moral decay in the good old USA, you need look no further than page 7A of Wednesday's Times-Union.
On it you would have found a story about four fifth-graders who were arrested for having sex in front of their class while the teacher was out of the room.
Yeah, fifth-graders.
A fifth student got in trouble for watching the door while this was going on.
The whole thing took place in New Orleans. There were a total of about 15 kids in the classroom when it happened.
A high school teacher was supposed to be in the room at the time, but went to an assembly for older students. The room was inadvertently left unattended for 15 minutes.
Apparently that was time enough for these four kids - two 11-year-old girls, a 12-year-old boy and a 13-year-old boy - to engage in sex.
That should be enough to shock the "nothing's shocking" crowd.
I was thinking back to when I was 11 or 12 years old.
I remember it well. I was at Washington Elementary School in Plymouth.
I remember girls. I picked on them. You know - yanking pig tails, hiding their books, stealing cookies off their lunch trays.
They picked on us boys, too, you know.
I remember dodgeball, kickball, baseball and basketball at recess.
I remember when Steve Slemp hit me in the head with a ball bat. He said it was an accident. I never believed him.
I remember coming in second in a spelling bee once, but I can't remember the word I misspelled.
I remember all my teachers and bus drivers.
But no matter how hard I wrack my brains I can't remember anything even remotely sexual.
My first recollections of an attraction to a person of the opposite sex beyond teasing and pranks came at the beginning of eighth grade when I met a girl whose name I will never forget but will not share with you.
She brought me to a new level of enlightenment with regard to girls. Please understand, this wasn't anything close to sex - more like holding hands and sitting close on the bus.
But I believe it was at that point that I felt this strange attraction and got the idea that there was a lot more to this whole girl-boy thing than I previously considered.
By today's standards I guess I was a bit of a late bloomer.
Of course, I was in eighth grade in 1971-72. It truly was a different time.
To quote an old TV cigarette advertisement: (Remember when it was legal to advertise cigarettes on TV?) "We've come a long way, baby."
For decades we've been fed a steady diet of sexually explicit and violent materials. It started out in the entertainment industry and as technology advanced, it slopped over into video games.
Now kids, by age 11 or 12, obviously, are quite savvy about sex and violence.
Kids stealing cars, bringing guns to school, having sex in the classroom. It's really pretty crazy, isn't it?
It creates a bit of a quandary for a guy like me.
On the one hand, having been in the newspaper business for 27 years, I find myself a pretty strong advocate for freedom of speech and expression.
(Some people say I allow a little bit too much free speech on our letters page.)
At the same time, I've been saying for a long time that society pays a price for the level of sex and violence in our entertainment.
It's to the point now that sex among teens and having children out of wedlock has become culturally acceptable.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 1970, only 5 percent of white live births were to unwed mothers. In 2004, that number was 30.5 percent. Black unwed mothers accounted for 37.5 percent of black births in 1970. In 2004, that percentage had risen to 68.8 percent.
The Alan Guttmacher Institute reported in 1996:
n Nearly 1 million young women under age 20 become pregnant each year.
n Approximately 4 in 10 young women in the U.S. become pregnant at least once before turning 20 years old.
The number of single-parent households creates a lot of work for the communities where these people live.
All manner of social ills can be linked back to unwed teens and single-parent households.
School system having problems? Test scores low? Dropout rates? Crime? Jail overcrowding?
As is the case with most editorial columnists, I am pretty good at identifying problems and not always the best at offering up solutions.
But it seems to me alarms should be going off everywhere.
Pre-marital sex used to be taboo. Now it's expected. Single parents used to be rare. Now they're common.
And at the risk of sounding preachy, I think the only answer is some sort of spiritual renewal.
All the life science education in the world isn't going to stop kids from having sex if the kids have no moral compass.
Or maybe there's no escape and we'll just tumble headlong into the abyss.
Unless we can turn it around, greed, perversion and immorality are going to ruin this country someday.
