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Two and One Half Minutes of Fame
A Sermon Given
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| But today, when every soap opera is rife with characters whose great wealth is only equaled by their moral neediness, paupers watching in shacks on every street are forced to admit that they are indeed poverty-stricken. With that knowledge and acknowledgment, there comes inevitably a lingering despair and a puzzling wretchedness. Why them and not me? Those questions are followed by a sense of worthlessness a remorseful regret at being alive. Then comes full-blown anger, resentment, a rankling bitterness that, if directed outward, can foment riots, revolution and social chaos. Most often, however, the convulsions of anger are directed inward. Thus the poor, the needy, the misfits of society implode. After the debris settles, they appear to the onlookers as dry husks of hopelessness. |
"The electronic community is less diverse than real life. The problems it deals with are not the problems that real people must face," writes Mary Pipher in The Shelter of Each Other. Our understanding of the media's role in shaping young people is incomplete but certain effects have been documented: passive consumption of commercial television can lead to deficits, non-reflective thinking, irrational decision making and confusion between reality and make-believe. One study claimed that children between the ages of six and twelve were developing an image of a mean world where people cannot be trusted. (Carnegie Foundation study on adolescent development)
Of even greater consequence is the development of vicarious relationships that create a new kind of loneliness. Years ago a sociologist postulated that there was a critical number of social contacts that a person needed every week to stay healthy. He speculated that we need seven familiar people or we become at risk. Study after study, and writer after writer concerned with and about children's development claim that family members may be in the same house but not interacting they watch other's stories unfold but do not share their own. With the proliferation of TVs, computers, stereo systems in many homes, family members become separated, each having their own experience with the media of their choice.
Mary Pipher worries that from television advertising, children learn that they are the most important people in the universe, that impulses should not be denied, that pain should not be tolerated and the cure for any problem is a product. These ads, especially, socialize children to be self centered, impulsive and addicted. Leonard Cohen called television "that hopeless little screen." We know that it teaches values as clearly as any church. All television is educational. It teaches values and behavior. Emerson said, "Life consists of what a person is thinking about all day."
We know that TV can be a force for good. It has shown its potential to foster values that positively affect the lives of children. Think about programs that have helped us gain new insight and perspective, enlightenment and knowledge, introduced us to new ideas, entertained us with good music and theater, introduced us to stimulating people. We cannot blame the problems of society on TV. What we must not do is to underestimate the power and influence of parents.
Robert Coles in his book, The Moral Intelligence of Children, tells this story from Tolstoy:
The grandfather had become very old. His legs wouldn't go, his eyes didn't see, his ears didn't hear, he had no teeth. And when he ate, the food dripped from his mouth.
The son and daughter-in-law stopped setting a place for him at the table and gave him supper in back of the stove. Once they brought dinner down to him in a cup. The old man wanted to move the cup and dropped and broke it. The daughter-in-law began to grumble at the old man for spoiling everything in the house and breaking the cups and said that she would now give him dinner in a dishpan. The old man only sighed and said nothing.
Once the husband and wife were staying at home and watching their small son playing on the floor with some wooden planks: he was building something. The father asked: "What is that you are doing, Misha?" And Misha said: "Dear Father, I am making a dishpan. So that when you and dear Mother become old, you may be fed from this dishpan."
The husband and wife looked at one another and began to weep. They became ashamed of so offending the old man, and from then on seated him at the table and waited on him.
In the final chapter of his book, Coles asks, "How ought we as parents and teachers to do the best job of handing on our principles and convictions and values to this next generation?"
The authors of Common Fire: Lives of Commitments in a Complex World tell stories of ordinary men and women who have made significant contributions to the common good. These interviews show that family and community relationships, education, the workplace, arts, religion and the media all matter. They can all help or hinder the formation of a life of commitment. The people in this book chose to make a difference wherever they found themselves. They were not special or exceptional but they were more in tune with the emergent needs of the world and able to move beyond some of the assumptions of the past. One of the interviewees put it: "We are only asked to take one step that makes another step possible." A common thread that ran through all the stories was that in some compassionate way, they had engaged with people different from themselves, learning again and again to cross and redraw the boundaries between self and other.
The epilogue of their book contains some very concrete suggestions about new directions that we could take to move toward the common good. "The moral life of the community is determined, in part, by the images available to it for the formation of the imagination by which it lives." The media are primary providers of those images in the contemporary world. Modern media has the power of amplification. The authors urge us "to examine media that make their appeal to children and youth during the years when citizenship is taking form and when images that will shape or distract a sense of trust and agency are being planted at the heart's core." Many people in their study said they came to a greater understanding of themselves and others through poetry, film, music, biography and theater.
The final chapter of The Moral Intelligence of Children is an open letter from Coles to parents and teachers. In it he shares some of his learnings from children. He talks about David, a ten-year-old dying of leukemia, who taught him that children need a sense of purpose and direction in life, of values grounded in moral introspection, of a spiritual life that is given sanction by parents and other adults. He learned that children constantly try to comprehend life's wonders and mysteries, its ironies and ambiguities. They engage in moral exploration. He tells of the importance of family stories stories of courage, fear and human behavior, of family memories, remembered feelings. He recalls that his parents were interested in specific moral goals for their children but that when they fell flat, they were not thrown a psychiatric life line that would have shifted the entire discussion, the heart of the matter, from morals to emotions.
He shares his experience with Eric Erickson, where Erickson said, "It's a long haul, bringing up our children to be good; you have to keep doing [it] ... You have to learn where you stand ... [It is the moral work] based upon speaking those moral sentences that you hope your kids will learn from you ...."
The journey with our children needs to be one of moral companionship. We will need to wade into the water time and time again. We have at our disposal the most sophisticated technical assistance but it must not, it cannot be substituted for the day to day encounters we must have with children everywhere.
We are our children's keepers. If we are to build a world of equity, justice and compassion, it is our task to set the stage. If we cannot determine what our children see, hear and experience, we can express our concerns, our thoughts, our ideas and our outrage. We cannot afford to have our children's world defined by the media.
We live in a complex world. The common good needs the work of our hands, minds and hearts.
"Let us sing a new song, not with our lips but with our lives." -- St . Augustine
Sources:
Coles, Robert. The Moral Intelligence of Children. New York: Random
House, 1997.
Daloz, Laurent A. Parks, Cheryl H. Keen, James P. Keen, Sharon Daloz Parks. Common Fire: Lives of Commitment in a Complex World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996
Great Transitions: Preparing Adolescents for a New Century. Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1995
Pipher, Mary. The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families. New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1996
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