Friday, September 16, 2011

Being Bad

THE not uncommon view that goodness, holiness, kindness are no longer hip, no longer valid behavior models for youth needs to remember the simple truth, being bad might create great conflict for movies, television, plays, and novels but being bad in real life creates problems, creates consequences. Being bad is not amusing, or disarming. What is highlighted is not always the best type of behavior, is not always the best choices. Our mistakes, our badness at times might be entertaining to our friends but not everyone will be laughing. Just imagine what the world would look like if every crazy thing we did, every temper tantrum, every time we used profanity ended up in a viral video on the internet and people viewed it and rated it. How would you feel? How would your friends and family feel? Our society is at a crossroads now, an intersection of taste, morality, and commerce. Commerce will probably win as more images of rudeness, betrayal, deception are presented to the public as normal behavior, as reality. Television distorts reality. It has since the medium began. Television provides a backdoor education for many people in what is and what is not acceptable in our society. What is presented does not truly reflect life in our society. It does project images which people can aspire to, images which people can see and imitate. We are all bystanders in someone’s latest internet movie. Just walk down the street and you will see someone with a camera pointed your direction. Will you be the gum chewing, coffee and scotch gulping, chain smoking, mustache twirling villain? Will you be the compassionate, merciful Good Samaritan? The world we live in today could easily be a Laurel and Hardy comedy of errors, rudeness, violence. The world we live in today is filled with excited voices both in front and behind cellphone cameras try to incite, trying to capture a scene. Cruelty is never funny. Brutality is never funny. We want to forget the pain and sorrow of the recent past by creating more pain, more heartache. We do not live within a movie set. People get bruised, reputations ruined, friendships and marriages destroyed. In the the world that we live in people die because of someone’s choice to be bad, to be the baddest person on the block.

Being bad does not require courage, confidence. We pretend that it does. Being bad is not funny. We pretend that it is.

Real courage, real confidence, real strength of character require a foundation of humility, charity, compassion. Real courage, real confidence know when to speak, when to pray, when to leave. Life is short enough why waste value time doing stupid things? Why not simply do something else, walk on a different path?

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