I’ve been sick all week. Just a bit ago, the school bus that picks up and drops off kids rolled up after a hard day at school. The engine rumbles as it idles, red lights flashing, cars backed up, as kids stream off.
I can hear the commotion in my apartment – two sides face out over the street where the bus stops. A clear, exited voice raised up, “Mama! Mama!” He was so exited about something. The trust and love – the innocence, the excitement to see his Mama.
I just started crying. I don’t know why. Not a bad thing.
Then, I started thinking…
It is so hard for kids growing up in these times. Growing up has never been easy, but in these times, well. So many kids – so innocent, so hopeful, so trusting – are being so harmed and their young lives bent and destroyed by so much of our culture. A culture that we allow. (Does poetic license cover using sentence fragments to make a point, or am I adding to the problem?)
So much of culture is degrading. I spent yesterday wondering through MySpace and so many of the high school and college age people, well, their pages are full of sexualized images of themselves or their language and descriptions of themselves is jarring. They mimic the adult MySpace pages. These kids are Paris Hilton, Nicole Richy, and Justin Timberlake wannabes. This is the impression they are fed and accept – image is everything; the image is sexualized; to be someone you have to be sexualized by exposing as much as you can get away with and having ripped abs. No substance. No depth. Only image. And we let it happen.
What are we doing and allowing to be done to our children?
South Park did a perfect job exposing all this in their typically rude, crude, and particularly gross way through this episode – “8.12 – Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset,” originally airing Dec. 1, 2004 (I think). You can read a synopsis of the episode from Wikipedia. Here is the script, if you want to read it. It isn’t for the easily skweemish – it is typically South Park. And, here is the final video of the “South Park Whore-off.”
At the conclusion of the Whore-off, Mr. Slave says, “People, don’t applaud me. I’m a dirty whore. [the crowd falls silent] Being spoiled and stupid and whorish is supposed to be a bad thing, remember? Parents, if you don’t teach your children that people like Paris Hilton are supposed to be despised, where are they gonna learn it? You have to be the- [feels something in his stomach] ooohooho, Jezuth Christh. You have to be the ones to make sure your daughters aren’t looking up to the wrong people.”
I don’t know. We spend less and less money educating our children well. We spend less and less with them, period. We give them over to other people to raise and to the culture, which is not the way to maturity, self-respect, sanity, freedom, peace, joy, or wholeness. It is the way of manipulation, deception, and making lots of money for some corporations and certain people. God, save us from ourselves, and save the little children. Who will be wearing a millstone around their necks?