Perri Nelson's Website 

Respect and authority

Here's just another reason to support the continued use of illegal drugs… The improved authority it gives you over your children. From KATU television in Portland we have this little gem.

NORTH KITSAP, Wash. - A 14-year-old boy upset that his mother threatened to send him to military school for skipping class turned her in Thursday for growing marijuana.

…

In her closet, the deputy found 10 small marijuana plants. She told the deputy "it is tough to get her son to respect authority when he knows she breaks the law growing pot," the report said.

The woman was cooperative, the deputy wrote, and was not arrested.

The Kitsap Sun has the original story, including this lovely bit.

The son said he was concerned that he got his mother in trouble. But, as the deputy noted, "all he wanted was for her to get the message and do the right thing," the report said.

Somehow, I think that everyone missed the point, except the mother. I question whether she'll have the wisdom or the strength to correct the problem though. I know how hard it is for me to deal with my own flaws (and no, I'm most definitely not growing pot at home).

[Update: In an IM conversation with one of my former coworkers, I passed along a link to the KATU story. Her response was "HA...she is so busted". Maybe that's the intended point of the story, but it's not what I take away from it.

Recent advertising in the campaign against illegal drug use brings up this point. If you don't want your kids to use drugs, even if you do, you have to get past your own problems with them and have the conversation anyway.]

And the point was, what about getting the kid to do the right thing? Sure, in his anger he did the right thing and turned in his mom's illegal activity, but what about his own discipline problem? Skipping class is illegal too, although not on a par with growing marijuana. Parents are responsible for their children's behavior. Parents are accountable for what their kids do and don't do. Parents are liable if their children don't attend school. Parents have the responsibility, and need the authority to discipline their children if they don't obey the strictures of our society. It's hard to hold authority and respect if you openly flout authority yourself. But it's still necessary.

Many conservatives today decry the moral decay that our society has seen. We look at the youth of today and shudder. Teenagers and young adults in an effort to look cool still wear their pants with the beltline between their crotch and their knees. Girls still dress like cheap hookers — and act that way. A lot of this is blamed on the media — on hip-hop music and rap, the MTV generation's substitute for class. Watch a hip-hop video or a rap video and it's likely to be full of gang-banger slang, drug references, misogyny, violence, and greed. At least the ones that are on when I happen to pass by are.

Watch a television commercial and look at how sluttiness and deception are glorified. One that come to mind are a recent car commercial showing a businesslike woman with the caption "1-800", followed by the same woman with her hair down, her blouse open and a lustful expression and the caption "1-900", as if the latter is an improvement. Another that comes to mind is the recent beer commercials advertising "wider opening" beer cans that allow air to "vent" in for a smoother pour. In that commercial, the man deceives his woman into thinking that he's sensitively going over to help a fellow "vent" and overcome depression. When she later calls to see how his friend is doing they're still "venting" — he's watching the game and getting drunk while he leaves her alone at home — some man.

I noted in an earlier post that on average about 25 million people watch the news on a weekly basis. Compare that number with the ratings for American Idol 2 with 26.5 million viewers on its first night! Americans are more interested in mindless entertainment and celebrity than they are in the welfare of their own country!

Look at modern video games. I guess I was fortunate that they hadn't been invented when I was growing up. I can see how addictive they are to kids. I recently (about a month and a half ago) purchased World of Warcraft and immersed myself in the game for a while, playing to the exclusion of most of the other things that I would normally do. My appetite for the game has fallen off, but I watch my kids play video games and their appetite for them never diminishes. They just want newer ones all the time, and quite a few of the games available are really things that leave me wondering. First person shooters teaching you how to casually kill people leave me cold inside.

As I reflect on this though, I don't think that the media is at fault. We've seen what looks like a tremendous moral decline in our country. What we see in the media is only a symptom of the problem though. It's not the cause. Media types have long been observed to say that they are only showing what people want to watch. Look at the numbers… its true.

How many parents (now grandparents) grew up in the sixties with it's culture of hedonism — sex, drugs and rock ’n roll? How many of their children noticed as they were disciplined for the very things their parents advocated for? How many of their children weren't disciplined at all? What was the "counter-culture" forty years ago is now pop culture. George Carlin's "seven little words" (by the way, the Supreme Court Case cited unconstitutionally upheld censorship by the FCC, with the majority opinion written by the liberal Justice Stevens) are now almost mainstream. Some young adults I know can't hold a conversation without at least one or two of them peppering nearly every sentence. Spike TV was advertising their airing of the Star Wars saga over the weekend with the descriptive tag "the whole freaking series". Politicians like John Kerry drop the f-bomb without even batting an eye.

Today, we are at war against terrorists. Some say that we're at war against radical Islam. Others say that there is no war against terror, that it's merely fearmongering from the right. Pick a side if you like, I don't care which. But I have to ask

• Didn't Osama Bin Laden declare war on the United States?
• Isn't there a terrorist organization named "Islamic Jihad"?

Don't you think they know that there's a war on terror? Don't you think that for them it's a holy war?

Meanwhile in the United States we have people trying to expunge Christianity and Christianity's God from the public square everywhere they can. In California, while the state doesn't go so far as to mandate the teaching of Islam in public schools, some schools actually DO participate in dress-up and role-playing during their study of Islamic history, using a biased text. The school in question defends this practice as noted by Snopes.

The ambiguity of the standard as well as the possible cant of the textbook have contributed to the current controversy. Peggy Green, Superintendent of the Byron Union School District, said in a press statement issued on 11 January 11 2002:

We are sorry for the misinformation that has been picked up by the media and the distress it has caused to parents and members of the public. The Byron School District is not 'teaching religion'; we are teaching the California state-mandated standards with state adopted textbooks. The public school system was established to educate all children. In light of the events of this past year, it is imperative that our instruction includes an understanding of and insight into all cultures and a tolerance for the diversity found in the world. As such, public schools do not "indoctrinate" children on various religions, but they do expose them to the belief systems that have impacted the formation of our world.

The flaw in that statement should by now be evident: If the belief system had been Christianity rather than Islam, there'd have been hell to pay.

And that's actually the case. Put up a monument depicting the ten commandments anywhere in this country and sooner or later somebody is going to object to it. The ACLU extorts millions of public dollars threatening lawsuits to have such monuments removed. Where they can't succeed at that, they try lawsuits to have other "religious" monuments added to "balance" the message. The United States Supreme Court recently decided to hear such a case… The court's past record of handling such cases doesn't encourage me very much.

With the Democrats so outraged by the mere possibility that the Lord God might happen to get involved in public life that they'll practically shout down the pledge of allegiance at their political caucuses who can deny that one of the very foundations of our American society is under attack? And if it's not fear of God being invoked then it must be simply an antipathy toward America itself. After all, while they may not be willing to embrace God, they certainly seem willing to embrace Allah.

YES. I AM QUESTIONING THEIR PATRIOTISM. They're members of the Democratic Party. Presumably that means that they're registered voters. Presumably that means that they're Citizens of the United States of America. Citizens of the United States of America that boo and hiss at the idea of pledging their faith, loyalty, and allegiance to the nation in which they are citizens. Any citizen that refuses to pledge fealty to their own nation is an unpatriotic and undeserving citizen! And that goes for the 43rd district Democratic Party members in Seattle!

I think that ultimately the blame for the perceived decline in our society lies with ourselves. It lies with parents who are stuck in their own hedonism and blinded to their own failings while trying to prevent those same failings in their children. The kid who sees that will grow up believing that either hypocrisy is fine, or that the values his parents are trying to instill aren't important. Or… as we see in Kitsap county children will begin using those moral failings to divert attention from their own.

Mark 13:12 says "Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death."

[Update: Before anyone tells me that I took this quote out of context, I realize that what Jesus was referring to was children rising up against their parents and turning them in to the state for their religious beliefs. Think about it for a minute or two OK? With pastors in Canada having to alter the content of their sermons to avoid hate-speech laws, and with Sweden explicitly including "church sermons" as subject to hate-speech legislation, is it really that far fetched to see the extension from what happened in Kitsap county to what Jesus had to say? In the case in Sweden the prosecutor said that…

"One may have whatever religion one wishes, but this is an attack on all fronts against homosexuals. Collecting Bible cites on this topic as he (Pastor Green) does makes this hate speech."

When backing up your statements with scripture qualifies as hate speech according to prosecutors then we're already far down the road toward the day when the Christian faith will be outlawed. And I don't trust the Supreme Court to defend our first amendment rights to Freedom of Religion with the court's record so far.

…And yes, this is different than the hate speech of Jeremiah Wright, which wasn't based on scripture.]

With the decay of our culture, how long will it be?

I noted in my last post that little things matter. I was laid up for several days by microscopic organisms that invaded my body in search of a comfortable place to raise their offspring.

The decay of our culture happens in little increments. We can look at it as a disease if you like.

Our maker gave us a way to overcome sickness. When the alien invaders come at us, other microscopic agents often come to our rescue. T-cells and lymphocytes attack the invaders. Anti-bodies attach to and destroy infected cells. The intelligence that God has gifted us with allows us to seek and discover chemical agents that disrupt the biological processes of the invaders.

So too with our culture there is hope. It starts with insisting upon standards for ourselves. It starts with insisting upon standards for our children — and enforcing them. And where necessary our own flaws need to be pointed out to us — and corrected.

If you believe, like I do, that our culture is in decay, perhaps there's an answer to it. Perhaps the answer is to live and make choices the way we'd like to see the rest of society live and make choices. Forcing our ideas on them isn't going to work — That's the way the Democratic party operates.

A tip of the hat to Orbusmax.

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Angel responded with:

Beautiful inspirational words Perri...wish all would absorb the profundity here!:)

Thinh responded with: Maybe society decaying is a state of mind

By the way, I don’t know about our society is decaying (per your post). Even I used to wear pants to my knees a few years ago. I think it all depends on how parents educate their kids. It’s still possible to have high values, even when dressed like a thug. My grandparents used to think tango was overly inappropriate – if only they saw kids dancing at clubs now. The question I’ve always wondered is – how far is it going to go in the future?

Maybe it's all a state of mind?

Perri Nelson responded with:

Thinh,

I think that every generation perceives a moral decline. We look on how we were raised, and we compare it to what we see around us and see decadence and decay. It is a state of mind.

Dressing like a thug isn't to my mind an example of moral decay, although it is rather silly. If you were really a thug, would you want to be hampered by having to hold you pants up as you either run after a victim or away from the cops?

Dressing like a harlot on the other hand is an example of moral decay. The girl that goes out of her way to look like a hooker in an attempt to arouse passion in the males around her is asking for trouble, or looking to cause it. If she exposes her breasts, men will look on with lust.

The rapist's defense might be "but look at the way she was dressed, she was asking for it." It's not a legitimate defense, but in a lot of cases, that just might be true. What really makes it bad is when the girl does it merely to provoke a reaction from a man that she can then pretend to be insulted by -- to lay claims of harassment.

My wife is in the health care industry. Last night we were discussing choice and consequence with each other. She told me that five out of ten women (half of them... is that right?) contract one of the 13 or so strains of HPV from their first sexual encounter. There has obviously been a moral decline when your risk for an STD your first time out of the gate is no better than a coin toss.

We've seen a lot of good things come out of mankind's march through history. The near instant communications we have available today is just one example. LASIK surgery is another that I'm particularly grateful for. We've also seen wave after wave of decadence and moral decline result in the overthrow of nation after nation as those more disciplined and holding to a strong moral center (whether it comports with what you or I understand as morality or not) overrun them.

And that's really what this post is about. If there is no standard by which you measure morality then eventually anything goes, and with it comes the elimination of the concept of personal responsibility. Eventually that leads to complete dependence upon others for your welfare and well being, a state of slavery and a lack of capacity to help yourself.

I don't want to be unable to help myself. I don't want to live in an age when decadence and decay result in the overthrow of our Republic, and that is the goal of some who have declared themselves our enemies.

Perri Nelson responded with:

Oh and by the way... come back and comment any time. I'd love to talk about what we disagree on.

Thinh responded with:

I have to retract a part of what I say actually, because the points are not focused and suitable for discourse. What I expressed was from a macrocosm viewpoint - one in which the entire world as a natural force, would ultimately take care of itself. In the grand scheme of things, I believe there is progression in one way or another and so if you look at it - the decline is only a small disturbance in the entirety of the pond of time. Just like the rest of mankind's history. I'm sure that people living during the Dark Age, or the Revolution, or many of mankind's dark times, would swear by their life that the world was near its end.

If we're talking about this at the microcosm point of view, then yes, I completely agree with you that there seems to be a decline in overall values.

Perri Nelson responded with:

Yes, well, taken on the grand timescale, events in the past couple of million years, as some paleontologists date humanity, barely amount to an eyeblink compared to the 14 billion or so of cosmic history. Surely given that perspective what we see in our own lifetimes is but an aberration. For most of us though, ancient history ended shortly before we were born. :-)