You promise?

Planning to sit down and write a bit this afternoon about Monday's Supreme Court decision justifying the Solomon Amendment, I went to grab a cup o'java and got distracted. I noticed on the back of the Cremora jar an icon that said simply "upromise", and underneath, "Join free / upromise.com". So, naturally, ...

From their website:

We believe that every child should have the chance to go to college. Upromise was established to give families an easy way to save - every day - and encourage them to start early by investing their own money for college on a regular basis. Our Rewards service offers money for college from America's leading companies...

Not what I was expecting, but a good idea, sure. My first thought was that it was something along the lines of "The Promise-Keepers". (It's an interesting play on the childhood question, "You promise?")

What strange times we live in, that we have organizations to remind us of our duties to one another, even help us to make promises to our spouses and children. Whereas societies and communities once established, encouraged and enforced the most basic duties of their members, now we see movements within our society and communities to organize intracommunity groups whose members will adhere to fundamental virtue.

I'm no sociologist, so I don't know whether these organizations and their adherents should be called sub-cultures or what. But their very existence - and there are probably others like them I haven't heard of - says something about the vast cultural chasm in America.

It also speaks volumes about the cultural damage our nation has sustained in recent decades, that we cannot even marshal a consensus condemnation of antisocial behavior and impose corrective sanctions on the renegades. As William F. Buckley put it, "A man who fathers a child whom he proceeds to ignore is a second-class citizen. How should we discourage second-class behavior?" And again,

Why are we so determined to "understand" those whose behavior is anti-social, whether sowing disruption in classrooms or seeds of life in lackadaisical engagements? A good society needs to be hospitible to virtue, which is the easy part; but shouldn't it also be inhospitable to dereliction?

Promise-Keepers. Upromise funds. Methinks our desperation is showing.