Sergetalks Blog ~ The Official Blog of Serge LeClerc

Just to recap some of the statistics of the plague of alcohol upon our modern day society and our young people:

Alcohol usage or misuse and alcohol related deaths are the number one killer of that same age bracket;

What numerous people do not realize is that many, if not most of the 50,000 cases of alcohol poisoning in the United States each year do not result from alcohol addiction, but rather from instance of alcohol abuse. Indeed, binge drinking, a type of alcohol abuse, leads to perhaps the majority of alcohol overdose cases that are reported each year. Obviously, many people are not aware of this information or about alcohol facts such as these.

While underage drinking is a factor in nearly in nearly half of all teen automobile crashes, the leading cause of death among teenagers. (more…)

For the trip to St. John’s Training School, I was put in a vehicle with a mesh screen separating me from the driver. I remember traveling down a road and going out into the country. It was a new experience for me. I had never been out of the city before.

St. John’s Training School was an ugly place. That was my first impression as we drove through the big steel gates. It had a rural, farmlike setting, but there was nothing peaceful or pastoral about it. The compound consisted of several austere, brown brick buildings and a barn. Much of the complex was surrounded by a chain-link fence. The rest was farm property adjacent to a small town where many of the staff lived.

I was immediately taken to the office of the Head Brother in charge of my assigned dormitory. There I had my hair shaved off, was issued a suit of clothing (blue shirt and pants, both about six inches too long, and black tennis shoes), given a blanket roll, and pointed to my bed. (more…)

We ended the last blog with speaking about the societal changes begun in the mid-1960, the moral and ethical left-hand turn, the movement into ‘MEism’, which has set up the change of consequences for the choices that young people make today – and the foundation of comparative values to judge those choices against. They are faced with the exact same choices every young person has always faced; sex, alcohol, drugs, how to dress and how to view one’s identity. We reviewed the reality of today’s consequences in the arena of sex by looking at the startling increase in the number of teenagers having sexual transmitted diseases and more alarming, the increase and diversity of the STDs themselves. Then we looked at the numbers of crisis pregnancy rates, the proliferation of abortions and the proportion below the age of 17 yrs, and the interrelationship of those factors to the spike of teenage female rates which is the 2nd leading cause of death amongst our teens. (more…)

As I discussed in the last blog; our kids live in a different world today then our day of yesteryear. There are two major differences, amongst a number of more minor ones, that has set the stage for the world that our children must make their way in today. They will be the first generation that will fully exist within the social fabric that the ‘MEism’ generation created. The second unique factor for the current generation is that they will be the first generation totally brought up within the ‘media parenthood’, from cradle to grave, never knowing a day when TV and advertising didn’t dominate their lives.

Let us start with the first factor – the moral and ethically reality that my generation put into motion beginning in the mid-60s. It was a time of teenagers and very young men fighting a war in a before unknown and strange country called Vietnam, dying in the thousands in its jungles – of a time when bomb shelters were being built in fear of the ‘atomic bomb’ being dropped on us by the evil ‘red empire’, the Soviet Union, of college students being shot on the campus of Kent State University for protesting the war, of Martin Luther King leading peaceful protest about ingrained racism, the Black Panthers declaring war over racism through violence, and a President and his Executive Cabinet resigning and going to prison over getting caught breaking into the Watergate office of National Democratic Party’s Headquarters – the British invasion of the Beatles giving way to the celebration of ‘a magic carpet ride’ and the indulgence of Dr. Timothy Leary’s promotion of ‘LSD’ – the ‘acid rock’ movement of Woodstock and Monterey Pop Festivals. (more…)