I’ve often come across the word “insouciance” in my reading, and wondered what it meant. It’s an important word to know. “Insouciance” is a “blithe lack of care or concern” for those things about which we should be concerned. There is an attitude of insouciance, especially among the “liberal” elites in our country, who are simply unconcerned about our country’s social collapse. The insouciant elites mock traditional values and convince America that only fascists have a problem with extramarital sex, abortion, marijuana, pornography, immodesty, vulgarity, and disrespect for authority. But the fact is, the socially privileged—movie stars and sports icons, political and academic elites—can afford to indulge themselves. They are generally wealthy, and can afford the safety nets of their therapists and detox clinics; they can pay for the best lawyers and PR agents to keep them out of trouble. But what of the vast majority of Americans who personally pay the price of the “sexual revolution” and the disintegration of traditional values? Those who form public opinion seem insouciant about social decline in the rest of the population. As long as they get to do what they want, they simply don’t care about the social wreckage caused by their demands for “personal freedom.”

We talk about the poor in America a lot, and we throw a lot of money into social programs. Certainly we must help the poor materially with things like food, rent assistance, and tuition scholarships, and our Church does that. The deeper poverty in America, however, is not material but social. After all, most of those living in the housing projects have cell phones and flat-screen TVs, but their lives are a mess. It is below the poverty line that a wholesale social collapse pervades every block: fatherless children, teen pregnancies, meth labs, unemployment, and crime at double the national average. Our school curriculums, our movies and music, and our shapers of public opinion have insouciantly convinced us to discard the virtues that preserve social harmony.

I quote from R.R. Reno in a recent article from the journal First Things :“Want to help the poor? ... By all means volunteer in a soup kitchen or help build houses. But you can do much more for the poor by getting married and remaining faithful to your spouse. Have the courage to use old-fashioned words such as chaste and honorable. Put on a tie. Turn off the trashy reality TV shows. Sit down to dinner every night with your family. Stop using expletives as exclamation marks. Go to church or synagogue.” Refuse insouciance, and practice the simple virtues that have built our country.