But, it's even more than that. It isn't just the consenses that change, when we let a bit of history like this be swept under the rug. It's our whole outlook on how we are to behave. This is why the attitude that one should "just forget about it" is wrong. It allows the abuses of the past to become the bad habits of the future. We don't just forgive, because that which is simply forgotten will be done again.

It's not just Usenet where this "go along, or we'll get you" ethic of the 1990s has been seen. It has crept into the classroom, where students now think nothing of trying to have a conservative professor's tenure revoked because of his "irrelevant and distracting thought patterns". It can be seen in social settings, where the faintest expression of a controversial opinion results in a quick shunning, and in the workplace, where it can get one fired. "It's a free country" goes the saying, but, increasingly, it isn't. What changed here, in this forum that so much of our country's younger adult generation spent so much of its time in, was part of our national psyche, and not one bit for the better. What was lost here, was the very expectation of individualism. The very idea that there is such a thing as principle and reason, that a lone individual can refer to (and be right), as he questions the established order (or the whims of the group, or those who guide it like the herd it has become).

No, Usenet didn't destroy that all on its own, but it surely had a major impact on those who will make policy in the future. When we see the young tell those who ask them to question the order of things to "shut up up and stop acting like fascists", it doesn't just tell us that they haven't got a clue of what a fascist is. It tells us that they're well on their way to becoming what it is they think they're condemning, and what an interesting future that would promise us. Look at the mob of students who pursued a young man through the UIC campus a few years back with baseball bats, because he was merely accused of mistreating a female student. Does the story even get mentioned any more? Do people even know to be shocked by such a story any more? That is where civility has gone. The "small" outrages that we comfortably sweep under the carpet leave us desensitized when larger ones come along.

As for other issues ...

I won't even try to go into the subject of the level of rationality that has been seen in campus discussions of late. I would need a whole extra site just for that, and a crate of antacid. No thanks, I'll leave that one for someone else.

Click here to continue.