Listening to our No 3 daughter talking about her upcoming classes for her second semester in college made me long to learn what theories professors are teaching now pertaining to aspects of society; especially sociology.

I've always been sort of partial to Emile Durkheim and his thoughts on social norms, cohesiveness, breakdowns, and anomie and would love to know how his theories of the past would relate to the world's fractured societies and especially that of America (I've always found it so idiotic when American "intellects" try to compare the aspects of America's melting pot society with that of more homogeneous countries like Japan when discussing things like crime and societal behavior and how our differences make such comparisons futile without taking that homogenous nature more deeply into consideration).

How it would be so fascinating to sit in a room with young people and brilliant professors and discuss all of these things, however, what bothers me is the current American chilling of the discussion of ideas.  There are just too many topics out there that have become "controversial" and enflamed where it is almost like, "oh, to even discuss that means one is some sort of 'ism'."

For example, I think we are on the cusp where bad behavior is now being accepted or explained by varying types of nullification - these include things like racial, tribal, political, gender, and other identifiers.  To illustrate, it's like a person's behavior before, during, and after something happens is completely ignored when it comes to the results of that behavior (now, don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing that if say a person runs from the police or resists arrest deserves to be beaten, but when we have riots over a person of color shot by the police when armed with a firearm or knife and preparing to harm someone, then something is wrong in our society. To further illustrate, recall back when the man in Dallas shot and killed numerous police officers - one of them he walked right up to and shot him in the head with an assault rifle - was dealt with by a robot killing him, people complained about such brutality.  Really? 

And all this gets me back to Durkheim who argued that for a society to refrain from deviance and anomie, we must have shared values and norms, but with the fracturing of American society (yes, it has always been fractured) we are so badly losing too many of these norms and shared values and we need to really focus on these shared values and norms.  And again, don't get me wrong - I'm talking about the true basics of humane values, compassion, and norms - things like lying, lack of integrity, pursuing true meaningful things in honorable ways, and all aspects like this are IMPORTANT things.  Sadly, in American life of the current day, I fear such things are in demise and in the near future I have no hope things are going to change for the better.