I am reading the "Intolerance of Tolerance" by D.A. Carson and he has this quote from Lance Morrow's essay in 1991 in Time magazine. You could see it coming even back then.
"The busybody and the crybaby are getting to be the most conspicuous children on the American playground. The busybody is the bully with the ayatullah shine in his eyes, gauleiter of correctness, who barges around telling the other kids that they cannot smoke, be fat, drink booze, wear furs, eat meat or otherwise non conform to the new tribal rules now taking shape.The crybaby, on the other hand, is the abject, manipulative little devil with the lawyer and, so to speak, the actionable diaper rash. He is a mayor of Washington, arrested and captured on videotape as he smokes crack in a hotel room with a woman not his wife. He pronounces himself a victim- of the woman, of white injustice, of the universe. Whatever. Both these types, the one overactive and the other over-passive, are fashioning some odd new malformations of American character. The busybodies have begun to infect the American society with a nasty intolerance - a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms. In Freudian terms the busybodies might be the superego of the American personality, the overbearing wards. The crybabies are the messy id, all blubbering need and virtually infantile irresponsibility."
Where do you stand? And how easy has society made it for us to be either one or the other at any given point?
