Yes, this is #34, because technically, I was supposed to do a journal entry for last Friday, but I actually spaced doing it while I was in Las Vegas over the weekend. All that sun and dry air just makes me extra forgetful I guess.
In other things, I was able to do a lot of reading for my History of England since 1689 class. I love the section we're on now, because it's the 20th century, and involves a lot more of the recent history that I have become somewhat acquainted with as I've been preparing to go to London, and the events in the last fifty years have a lot more to do with the current state of England than anything else I have read about in the class.
I am particularly interested in the effect of the welfare state on the people in England. I wonder if it has anything to do with how religious they are. Did the "swinging sixties" throw the populace into a state of moral and religious disinterest that they've never really come out of it. That wouldn't seem to be the case, because the loss of religiousness that I have researched has been since 1983, which was the year that Margaret Thatcher won her second election as Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher was said to have brought back an emphasis on Victorian Era values of home, family, and respectability, that seem in my mind to be connected to traditional religion. Hmm, I guess I should try to find more information from the UK census or other polls about the levels of religiosity in the 1960s and 1970s. I really haven't been paying much attention. I do know from a book about religion in the UK that religiosity took a serious hit in the 1960s. Perhaps it was the attendance that took the hit then, and more recently the loss has simply been in open affiliation. Perhaps the loss of open affiliation, too, is just a more open acceptance of the true lack of religiosity that already existed in the 1980s, but that the British were simply less willing to admit.
Looks like there's more reading for me to do...
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