Every day, I see that this world is not my home. I may live here, but I am about as alien as they come. I’m a Christian, a father, a husband and over age 25. It seems as if everything this world and in particular its media Is making fun of me, trying to tempt me or scare me, get me to judge other people or appeal to my baser instincts.
For example, I walked into a Blockbuster today. I recalled when I went in that I hadn't gone inside one in at least five years. Immediately, I also remembered why I had not done so. No, it wasn’t a mountain of late fees, although I’m as guilty as the rest of us in earning those fees. Instead, I was confronted with the wasteland our entertainment industry has become in the last twenty years. My children were looking just to spend a gift card, and they got an eyeful of raunchy, gross, disgusting DVD jackets. And that was just the children’s section. OK, I was kidding about that last part, but I think any person over the age of 30 can attest to that decline. I understand that tastes change and new subject matter must be generated or the content gets stale. But that doesn’t justify the wholesale slide we have taken into the muck. If I need to cite examples, I can, but I don’t think most people would have trouble believing my point. I was glad to leave the Blockbuster as soon as we could with a newly purchased, previously abused DVD that I knew was okay for my family to watch.
But I don’t need to look at movies alone to see that this world isn’t my home. I find it odd that a government would restrict children from praying in public schools because it might possibly be construed as an endorsement of a particular sect, and yet, when students shoot up a school cafeteria, the first thing any public official says as consolation seems to be a variation of, “Our prayers are with you.”
I am mystified when it’s announced that some corporation’s employees will spend hours in sensitization classes discussing how to make our Muslim co-workers more comfortable, when another employee is reprimanded for having a Bible on their desk. I almost wonder what one has to do to get their religion some respect in the workplace.
Christians are constantly insulted, put down and flat-out lied about in the media, but when Christians in Sudan are massacred wholesale, the media doesn’t lift a finger. I’m amazed when Don Imus gets fired for calling a girls basketball team “nappy-headed hos” (words borrowed from rap artists themselves) and yet other artists and celebrities insult Christianity and make their bread and butter by it.
Why, when pregnant women are murdered, does the criminal face two counts of homicide, yet a doctor can perform a "procedure" in nearly any public hospital, take that fetus’s life in cold blood, and be paid to do it? It doesn’t make sense to me.
I’m not a huge Anne Coulter fan, but I think she has it right when she ridicules schools for handing students condoms and telling them to "be safer" and in the next breath students are told that it’s immoral to litter or fail to recycle. The school system stigmatizes one thing and not the other. It could be a moral choice to recycle, but I know that abstaining from sex is also a moral choice. How can we fail to teach them about abstinence and yet insist they pick up the trash? Ms. Coulter was right: Maybe we should teach them “safe littering” instead, because it seems to be more practical.
Pornography, lewd and lascivious behavior and sexual entertainment are available so readily in our society and the Ten Commandments are ripped out of courthouse lawns as fast as the ACLU can file a suit. This also doesn’t make any sense to me. Incidentally, God wasn’t joking when he said, “Do not covet your neighbor’s wife.” Men have enough trouble with that one already, and we are making it more difficult. I say "we," because we as a society allow it to remain available from every cable jack, internet connection and, just in case we missed anyone, pay-per-view satellite. Again, this place is not my home.
If it were, I would be a native, absorbing and contributing to the “culture of death,” as Pope John Paul called it. Instead, the summer I turned 18 years old was the summer I embraced my faith wholeheartedly, deciding that I was going to worship God with my life, no matter what my peers thought of me. In fact, I can remember the specific worship service I chose to do so. It was while we were at a Christian school competition nearly 16 years ago. That experience was one of the most memorable of my life, and it was because I chose God before everything else. This world is not my home, and I'm homesick.
For more on the double standards of Conservatives vs. Liberals, here's a good op-ed.
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