If It Feels Good, Do It!

By Kay H. Wilson

If It Feels Good, Do It!

Those words were part of a découpage/collage thing I made on a coffee can in 1969 and kept in my bedroom, along with other slang used at the time like “far out,” “groovy,” “cool” and more. I thought of it, if I thought about it at all, as a manifesto of sorts throwing off the constraints and repression of a previous era; a frivolous and harmless expression of the times.

I was, therefore, quite shocked to read New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks’ Sept. 12 column referring to research done by sociologist Christian Smith’s team at Notre Dame. Briefly, the researchers asked 230 18- to 23-year-olds detailed, open ended questions about the morals of right and wrong.

Their answers led researchers to believe that short of rape and murder pretty much anything goes according to how someone “feels.” The young adults opined that they weren’t in control of how other people felt about right and wrong and if those people were okay with it they should go for it. Many of them couldn’t even successfully define a moral dilemma.

Is this why people younger than my 60 years push me out of the way at store entrances, fail to hold the door for me if I’m laden with packages and don’t bother with excuse me, often with their parents looking on in silence?

Hubby and I were out of town recently and needed someone to stop in once a day and give our cat some canned food. There’s a kid in the neighborhood we would trust to do this. But what if he brings the little heathen he hangs with? And heathen decides he “feels” like going through our drawers or pocketing some spare change we left laying around? Does trusted kid shrug his shoulders and say “Well, he felt like it; who am I to say?”

The implications of not having a moral spine are far-reaching even beyond neighborhood kids not yet certain of their own moral fabric. I shudder to think.

Brooks feels certain that marriage, parenthood and daily exposure to the imposed moral structure of the workplace will realign these drifting moral compasses. But I would worry that the parents of these 18-23 year olds didn’t properly define morality for these young adults and therefore it’s not as firmly implanted as it should/could be.

I was aware, at 16-17 years old, that “if it feels good, do it” was a poke, a prod at my own parents’ set of values they had passed to me; a childish, perhaps, but authentic testing of the waters. And while I certainly participated in many of the behaviors of the time that pushed back a previous generation’s boundaries, my heart, soul and mind were always very aware of where the moral line was drawn. Is that still true today?

Yours in hope and cynicism,
The Compassionate Curmudgeon

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