Dennis Prager remembers the good old days, when we baby boomers were kids, and America was still a free country and Americans were basically sane.

With the important exception of racial discrimination — which was already dying a natural death when I was young — it is difficult to come up with an important area in which America is significantly better than when I was a boy. But I can think of many in which its quality of life has deteriorated.

When I was a boy, America was a freer society than it is today. If Americans had been told the extent and number of laws that would govern their speech and behavior within one generation, they would have been certain that they were being told about some dictatorship, not the Land of the Free. Today, people at work, to cite but one example, are far less free to speak naturally. Every word, gesture and look, even one’s illustrated calendar, is now monitored lest a fellow employee feel offended and bring charges of sexual harassment or creating a “hostile work environment” or being racially, religiously or ethnically insensitive, or insensitive to another’s sexual orientation.