I'm a late comer to this particular debate and haven't read back through it's history. I couldn't help but comment on your statements about the Netherlands. Having spent a great deal of time in the Netherlands over the past twenty five years, I can tell you that is a unique country. Overall the people are very friendly, educated, and industrious. It is also a fairly prosperous country. It's prosperity, interestingly enough doesn't come so much from within, but rather from it's investments abroad. It's following a successful formula that has served it well for five hundred years. A little country, thriving by it's international commerce. A little known fact is that for the last decade, the Netherlands has been the number two foreign investor in U.S. companies and property, behind Japan. That's not saying that it doesn't have a domestic industrial base, it does. It's giant Phillips consortium is fast becoming one of the preeminent high-tech electronics and communications firms in the world.
Having said all of that, the traditional, anything goes, fleshpot of Amsterdam (One that I enjoyed frequently in my younger days) is now acknowledged by all but the most myopic hedonists as being past the crisis point. Just below the surface of this 24 hour a day party is an epidemic of disease, crime, and death that has long since overtaxed the Netherlands ability to deal with it. The death rate from AIDS, between prostitution and drug use is the highest in the Western world. The theory that drugs provided without the stigma of being a crime and with a user populace that was educated on how to prevent infection while using intravenous drugs has been proven patently false. The bottom line is that after a certain point, while under the influence, most users could care less where the needle they are using came from or whether the sex they indulge in is safe. On the contrary, one of the hottest new fads in Amsterdam (and in a few other so called "liberal" cities around the world) is to "ride bareback" and share needles indiscriminately just to enjoy the rush of indulging in something that is possibly fatal. This goes as far as "Russian Roulette" drug/sex parties where at least one of the partygoers is HIV positive, but their identity is kept secret. One of the most outspoken proponents of the bareback movement says that it only reflects the fatalism of a generation with no hope for the future.
That doesn't sound very much like a culture that is "very wealthy spiritually". |
