If you doubt that America has lost control, drop by your neighborhood skating rink some Friday night.
Rev. Fred Morris, executive director of the Florida Council of Churches, happened to be at an Orlando-area skating center one recent Friday night–a designated “children’s night”–picking up his 11-year-old daughter. What he saw shocked him and should shock anyone still capable of outrage.
In the center of the darkened rink were 40 or 50 children–the oldest of whom was about 11, according to Morris’ guess–forming a circle. Morris couldn’t see what they were doing from a distance and approached only at another parent’s urging.
There in the center of a circle were several boys and girls acting out various positions of simulated sex. He says one boy about 9 or 10 was grinding away on top of a girl of about the same age. Several boys made sandwiches of little girls. One boy stood behind a girl, pressed against her from behind and wrapped his arms around her to stroke her genital area.
Excited yet? The girl apparently was. She had her eyes closed and was moving as one might expect under consensual circumstances, Morris said. The crowd of kids was fascinated if not stimulated. Morris was sickened.
He spoke with the rink manager. He spoke with one of the three deputy sheriffs who patrolled the rink. He even went the next day to the local police. No one seems to have seen or complained about what Morris says he saw. As the police put it to Morris, no victim, no problem.
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There’s a problem, all right, and we’re fools not to notice.
The problem isn’t parents dropping their kids off at a skating rink on a Friday night. Most parents would feel comfortable leaving their children for a few hours at a “children’s night” with law-enforcement officers present.
The problem isn’t necessarily this rink or any other. It’s the giant rink of life, where basic standards of decency have become as outmoded as the metal skates I used when I was the age of these kids.
For the record, the rink manager assured me in a telephone conversation that “dirty dancing,” as he calls it, isn’t allowed.And then he said the magic words: “But it’s a different world.”
Amen. What happened at the rink is a microcosmic view of much that’s gone wrong. Our sex-saturated culture–from television, music and the nightly news–has created a generation that is, frankly, sex-obsessed. Young children publicly mimic the kind of adult behavior that should be private and seek sexual stimulation at an age when they should be, well, roller skating.
The “if it feels good do it” generation begot children of relativity who have learned that nothing really matters. Which is sad and scary at the same time. It’s sad for children who are missing out on childhood; it’s scary for those who will become old among a generation that never knew innocence or shame.
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