Life sure is complicated these
days, isn’t it? Everything happens at the speed of light. People want what they
want, and they don’t just want it now, they want it five minutes ago. Not only
individuals, but our entire society, it seems, has pivoted to the instant, and
even to the unreal.
There are instant foods that
you pop into the microwave, aka the instant cooker, to prepare your daily bread;
there are machines on street corners and in most stores where you slip a piece
of plastic into the slot and receive back instant cash—and it doesn’t even have
to be cash you have in the bank. It can be cash you don’t even really have at
all.
Then there are all the bells
and whistles attached to this behemoth we call the Internet. Talk about
unreality? I like to play games. I always tell anyone who will listen that
playing a few games each day helps my brain to stay limber. Insofar as that
goes, it’s true. But one of the game sites I go to, where I pay a fairly modest
annual fee to be a “member” will allow you to purchase, for money, things such
as backgrounds and clothing, pets and other accoutrements for what essentially
is a non-animated computer-generated image that is your “face” on the game site.
Yes, you can pay real money for something that truthfully isn’t real at all. And
what you’ve purchased is only “yours” for as long as you’re a member of that
site. Stop paying your annual fee? Bye-bye avatar and all those purchased
items.
This modern age we find
ourselves in is a time when we, as individuals, as a society, have re-defined so
very many previously well established and accepted concepts and norms of
life.
TV commercials now show an
“ideal” home life where evenings find family members sequestered in different
rooms in the house, where they’re “on line”, or “watching movies”. Groups of
kids in two separate rooms, and the parents alone in a third. This is the new,
modern family time.
But it isn’t just activities
that are being redefined, it’s actual tenets, the codes by which we as a society
are organized and behave. I can recall a time, not so long ago, when individuals
and society as a whole condemned the telling of lies. There was a time when, if
you lied even once, you became known as a liar, and it was a long, long
time before you would be trusted again. Being known as a liar was an
anathema.
Making a mistake in life was
something we all avoided, and still do, but it would happen regardless, and that
was bad enough. But add onto that mistake the crime of lying? That didn’t
just make your original mistake doubly bad—it made it practically
irredeemable.
But today we are sliding into a
world of “alternate facts”. People who should be our role models as examples of
decency are lying on a daily basis, and getting away with it. They are getting
away with it because we let them. We say they are confused, or not completely
informed, or that they really didn’t mean, literally, what they’d said, or
tweeted, or any number of euphemisms we use these days instead of good, old
fashioned plain speaking.
I would dearly love to see us
return to that plain speaking. I know it’s normal for someone of my age to wish
for simpler, kinder times; hell, when I was in my teens, I heard older people
then express this same, basic desire. But here’s the thing: There wasn’t
anything as overtly alarming in those past times that inspired this desire in
the older generation for those kinder, simpler days. It was more a longing to
embrace once again that which was familiar, that with which they’d grown up. The
desire was, basically, sentimental in nature.
It can be very disorienting
when the minutia of life changes so much that those who are older can feel left
behind, and long for the days when they weren’t in the dark, long for the times
they felt included and a part of it all.
That is worlds away and far
different from the problems facing individuals and our society today. The
problem we face is not a problem of feeling lost in the unfamiliar: it is a
problem of being divorced from basic decency and the truth.
The bad news is that until
people stand up for what is right—until they are willing to speak truth to power
and say, “no, sir, that is a lie”, and curb that tendency toward lying at every
turn, things are only going to get worse, and they will get worse in ways we
can’t even fully imagine yet.
The good news is that I just
picked up a book that many of those very people who appear to be unwilling to do
the right thing, claim to hold as a treasured source of inspiration. This book
they claim to be the cornerstone of their lives, is a book that they claim to
hold in reverence. I opened that very book, and I quickly thumbed to a specific
point, and, whew, what a relief! Just when I thought everything had
changed—turns out, it really hasn’t!
Exodus 20:16 still reads and
means the same, exactly, as it always, always has—and
always, always will.
Love,
Morgan
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