Let me make the point this way: Your being any way other
than genuinely virtuous—not perfect, mind you, but honestly and
diligently seeking to do the right thing at all times—will tend to drive your
children crazy. Here’s how the craziness unfolds. Children deserve and
desperately need firmness, patience, fairness, limits, kindness, insight, and a
good, nonhypocritical example. In other words, they need genuine parental love
and guidance. If they don’t get this, they will resent you. Even if you can’t
see it, even if they can’t see it, and deny it, they will resent you for failing
to give them real love.
And that resentment—which becomes suppressed rage—is a destructive,
unpredictable, radioactive foreign element in their makeup, which then
transmutes into every manner of problem, complex, and evil imaginable. It makes
children feel compelled to rebel against you and against all authority out of
revenge for your having failed them. And it makes everything forbidden—from sex
to drugs to tongue studs to things worse—seem attractive, like a road to
personal freedom. Rationalizations and philosophies that they would have once
laughed at as ridiculous now make sense to them. Practices they would have
shunned in more innocent times, they now not only embrace but celebrate. All of
this usually occurs below the level of consciousness.
Today’s youth rebellion is not only against failing parents but
against the entire adult society—against the children of the 1960s cultural
revolution who grew up to become their parents. Unfortunately, many of us never
shook off the transforming effects of that national trauma, which birthed the “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” youth counterculture,
the leftist hate-America movement, the women’s liberation movement, and
overriding all, of course, the sexual revolution.
So we grew up to elect one of our own—a traumatized, amoral baby
boomer named Bill Clinton. If you don’t think Clinton's escapades with Monica
Lewinsky—covered by the media like the Super Bowl—had everything to do
with the explosion of middle-school sexual adventures across America, then open
your eyes. We, the parents of this generation, along with the degrading
entertainment media, the biased news media, the lying politicians, the
brainwashing government school system, and the rest of society’s once-great
institutions whose degradation we have tolerated, are responsible.
No wonder our children are rebelling. And today’s insane
Sodom-and-Gomorrah culture, which we have allowed and in many ways created,
stands waiting in the wings to welcome them with open arms.
5 comments:
That will preach!
Even though the excerpt is written in moderate psychobabble and excludes any reference to the spiritual wandering away, it is spot on in it's stance.
It is not in out nature to be the way we should be without the influence of the Holy spirit, given only through the direct relationship with the one and only Son of God, Jesus Christ.
Even some secular commenters are beginning to see the results of generations of rebellion.
You're spot on RBS. The portion that I cut states nearly your exact words. Without that, we're hopeless.
In the early part of the 20th century, there were still guard-rails - stigmas, taboos - defining lines of what was acceptable and what was not.
Somewhere after the mid-point of that uniquely American century, the radical left had made significant inroads into our culture, giving us Timmy Leary and Merry Pranksters and the like. What had once been a defining badge of Americanism - the ability to freely articulate one's ideas - became bastardized.
Whereas most before had understood the responsibilities, protocol, and decorum of expression, the latter half of the century was populated not so much by free thinkers proclaiming profound ideas, but by an increasing parade of clowns, ever louder, but ultimately devoid of ideas and rational thought. I believe it was expressed as The medium is the message.
Our Creator God imbued us with all that we needed to live happy, fulfilling lives. But, by chapter 3, our sinful nature had already earned the first family an eviction from the perfect garden neighborhood. Yet in His mercy, God ransomed us from our death decree through Christ Jesus.
Today, some of His people hear His word and turn to true life - while others rebel, or say He isn't relevant, or doesn't exist. But He hasn't changed, and truth hasn't changed.
We have the same responsibility today as Peter and Andrew - to be fishers of men. Immorality and depravity will not abate just because some of us know better - we have to put on our spiritual armor and shine God's light into the darkness of the culture.
I have to agree with your posting from the book, as well as all that was posted above. May we live our lives as examples for others. Mo
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