Do YOU remember?

I was reading back a year or so ago and came across this nugget from Anthony Esolen:

Do you remember a time, readers, when you could spend a whole day, actually a whole month, occasionally even a year, and not give one passing thought to the issue of sexual perversions?
Do you remember a time when not one liberal in a thousand would have thought it a good idea to have drag queens do story-hour for children in a public library? When people who fell into sexual perversion, or who are alleged to have done so, or who are alleged to have wanted to do so though they did not, or who are alleged to have been the sorts of people who would have wanted to do so if they had known What We Know Now, were not held up for the admiration of children, in their school textbooks?

Do you remember a time when not one liberal in a thousand would have thought that a man who said he was a woman or a woman who said she was a man was in touch with reality and not prey to a destructive fantasy or delusion?

Do you remember a time when liberals, precisely because they were liberals, held men and women up to high standards of sexual decency, and (wrongly) believed that they were capable of maintaining those standards without the ministrations of the Church?

Do you remember a time when it would not have occurred to you in a hundred years that your priest was anything other than an ordinary man, a real man, following the special call of the Lord? A man who in another life, with a different call, would have been married with a passel of children, a pillar of his community?

Do you remember a time when a priest could march alongside miners and auto workers and look like one of them, not like a breathless female reporter in the locker room of a football team? Do you remember when nobody, absolutely nobody, would have considered that a female reporter should even be in that locker room?

Do you remember a time when divorce was a scandal? I do. Do you remember a time when family-owned motels would not let unmarried people book one room instead of two? Do you remember a time when boys and girls actually dated, and when the vast territory between loneliness and going to bed as a married couple had not been strafed and scorched and left with not a single healthy custom standing – a cultural Nagasaki and Hiroshima, from sea to sea?

It occurred to me that the numbers of those who cannot recall such a time is shrinking!!  It is not deliberate, mostly the cause of age and mortality rates, but the fact is unmistakable.  The numbers of those who do not have any recollection of such a time will continue to shrink until the oddity becomes the norm and the memory of cleansed from those who would object to these things as aberrations or deviations or immoral.

Why is it so important to teach the faith to the children, to address the cultural changes that set the world adrift away from our moorings in Scripture and tradition?  Because the press of media and the mantra of change soon normalizes these and impresses into our youth that this is the only reality that ever was.  So forgetful are we of history, that our past is always a mere wisp of a memory that will fade unless rehearsed in conversation, teaching, devotion, and life.  That is why the vocation of parenthood for Christians is so very essential and important.  Parents, do not ever forget it.  The forces educating and entertaining your children are against you so you must be ever vigilant and devoted to your task and vocation.  Children are not toys or playthings but a sacred trust from God.  God help us if we fail in this task.