The Dream is Over

By Restless [Originally on goofyblog 4.26.07]

Rolling Stone just came out with its 40^th Anniversary Issue. I remember buying issue number 2 from a street vendor on Polk Street back in the day. That’s how it was first sold, just like other indie newspapers (the Berkeley Barb, Bay Guardian, Haight Ashbury Oracle).

It was a San Francisco mag, run first out of Straight Arrow Publishing on Brannan near 8^th and then its own digs on 3^rd between Brannan and King. Finally, it was time to leave San Francisco for New York, without looking back.

They chose to commemorate their 40^th with about 10 interviews (Bob Dylan, Jimmy Carter, Patti Smith, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Jackson Browne, Neil Young). I found the interviews fairly boring and inconsequential (Neil Young’s brief recounting of coming straight to LA from Canada in the mid/early ‘60s with his bass player friend, buying a hearse and taking hippies from one place to another on the Strip for a dollar was one of the interesting parts).

By presenting these interviews in their 40^th issue, they were saying here are these icons of the ‘60s and ‘70s when we started out and here’s what they have to say now.

Here’s what I have to say now: What did all the men and women — millions of them, the ones who made these artists popular — do after they got out of their 20s? When RS started, there were many radical ideas afloat (women’s lib anyone?). It was obvious then that sex ed was necessary. It was the least radical of all the ideas, already common in other civilized countries.

Hmmm. These “kids” grew up to became parents, then apparently, they turned into their parents … or their grandparents. What on earth would happen to convert someone to the belief that abstienence only sex education could work.

Well, the dream is over for the boomers like Bush, who push this crap.

This just in from Deb Price of the Detroit News:

A congressionally mandated study that tracked 2,057 kids for several years — until, on average, they were almost 17 years old — found that most (51 percent) started having sex, regardless of whether they’d been taught “abstinence only.”

“Youth in the (abstinence) program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners,” concludes the new report by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. (Find it by Googling “Impacts of Four Abstinence Education Programs.”)

Just 49 percent of each teen group remained abstinent. Of those having sex, equal numbers always used a condom (just 23 percent). And the sexually active in both groups, on average, first had intercourse at 14.9 years old.

What else is true? Sexually active teens aren’t doing nearly enough to protect themselves. Each year, one-quarter of them contracts a sexually transmitted disease. And about 800,000 teenage girls a year get pregnant.

What’s also true is that although some adults like to believe in the no-sex-before-marriage fairy tale, the reality is that 95 percent of Americans eventually have unmarried sex, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies sexuality.

So, we adults are miserably failing our nation’s children by allowing Uncle Sam to tell states that it won’t help pay for sex education other than “abstinence only” courses that either don’t mention condoms and other ways to make sex safer or mention them only to stress failure rates.

Via Alternet