Today was going to be another one of those mind-melting days; buried deep in code. Imagine my astonishment when I found The Anchoress, Fausta, Sigmund, Carl & Alfred and Gagdad Bob ALL expounding on the exact topic that had been bouncing around in my head the last few weeks since school started – parents & children/evil & virtue/darkness & light/Radical Islam, the rest of the World & what the future holds. In a way, it’s good to know that I am not the only distraught parent on this planet.
The Anchoress took another Fausta post as her springboard. And she’s dead on. With teenage children myself, I try to watch (read: stomach) some of their favorite shows to get a feel of “whatzup”. Gag. On Disney & Nick, the girls are always in charge/the boys are inept/parents are clueless & derided. Don’t even get me started on S&TC, The OC, Nip/Tuck, you name it. It’s just a rehash of who slept with who. Greed. Lust. Violence. Conspicuous Consumption. Anything goes. Welcome to AnyWhere High; now show us your boobs.
[Fausta was at a nail shop.] Seventeen gives a lot of sex advice, not just on birth control, but on how. Glamour, Jane, and Cosmo might be marketed to women in their early twenties but I assure you that when I was 12 years old (way before Jane was concieved) I was reading my neighbor’s older sisters’ Cosmos at their house. In a recent issue of Jane, for instance, there was clear and explicit advise on how to perform oral sex, and how and where to have sex in public. The subject of the articles is not much different from what Gerard Van der Leun was editing back when he worked for Penthouse.
If you believe I exaggerate, read what (according to the NYT article The Taming of the Slur) Atoosa Rubenstein, editor of Seventeen magazine, has to say:
“Today, ‘slut,’ even ‘ho’ – girls use it in a fun way, a positive way,” said Atoosa Rubenstein, the editor in chief of Seventeen magazine, adding that a phrase such as “you little slut” has become a way for girlfriends to bust each other’s chops.
As Betsy Newmark asked,
Does this strike anyone else as really a sick sign of where we are in our society?
The net result, as The Anchoress points out, is that many young men are finding
that intimacy has been defined downward, especially for our young girls, to mean little more than a “hook-up.” This is something Buster talks to me about. Children, but especially girls, are being sexualized at ever-earlier ages. The sexual messages begin very young in television commercials and on the clothes-store racks, and most of Buster’s generation grew up watching Friends and Sex in the City and thinking that this was what life was: a series of sexual encounters with no emotional attachments, no repercussions, no pain, no loss of oneself.
Sexualized early, many girls are either overly jaded or mistrustful and remote. Buster says a troubling number of girls his age are sexually hyper-active, but unhappy and lonely – they cannot make good, healthy connections with respectable young men, because they don’t “get” the guys who open car doors for them and who look for a relationship to be about more than a “hook-up” or perfunctory oral sex. (A romance recently busted up because Buster wanted a real relationship, and the girl, a nice-enough kid, simply did not know what that meant!)
These are the very same children, who just a few years before, giggled in the bathtub with younger siblings, played in the mud, jumped in the bed with mom & dad during thunderstorms, made houses out of chairs & blankets and stuck Cheeto’s up their noses. Fausta again:
Children are the salvation of their parents. Frequently we don’t realize this, but it is true.
That is why every day millions of parents around the world work three jobs to send their kids to good schools, mortgage their houses to meet college tuition fees, donate blood and kidneys and blood marrow so their children can survive, stay awake at night taking care of sick kids, and do the millions of tasks that parents willingly do. Any good parent gives their life for their child.
The very same beloved babes the world now uses and throws away.
There’s the acceptance in the Western World, in the name of multiculturalism and who knows what else, of societies that indulge into what for most of us is inherently revolting, aberrant degeneracy: the weaponization of children. Children suicide bombers, children witnessing public acts of unspeakable barbarity, children used as shields during gun battles, and the corpses of handicapped children (link in French) used as (warning: graphic images) (delinked) death porn in a propaganda war.
I think one of the hardest things to stomach these days is the current collegic atmosphere. It’s The OC on steroids. Now granted, I went to the #1 party school of the nation (when I was there). But putting the multicultural, p.c. mumbo-jumbo aside (just read some of Mike Adams) that our kids are forced to regurgitate for grades (what ever happened to independent thought? That’s a topic for another day!) or that hapless administrators force down the student body’s respective throats in the spirit of “free speech”, let’s address how these students treat one another. Anchoress:
While the girls are untethered and confused balls of sexuality, too many boys are learning to see the girls not as young women to be respected, admired and (in a chivalrous sense) looked after, but as disposable spitoons for their disregarded and misunderstood sperm. I’ve heard my sons and his friends complain about it – that their generation is very screwed up about how to relate to each other, that too many of both gender have no idea what self-respect is, that they treat themselves, and each other, badly. They crave intimacy but have no idea how to achieve it when they’ve been raised to throw everything – their virginity, their standards, their drive to succeed (it’s not cool to get good grades) – their potential, their very selves away. You cannot learn or achieve intimacy if you’re busy conforming to the Culture of Now – what Flip Wilson used to call The Church of What’s Happening Now – you’re too busy just trying to keep up.
And again, in her laud of the He-Man, (brought on by looking at older pictures of herself), she asks about what has happened to the sincerity in our relationships with each other. I have been doing that too, lately. Pictures of myself in college – was I really that thin? That pretty? My hair would really stay that straight? Even outside? But one thing I do know, is that the young man on the other side of that lens, who eventually became my husband, loved me and cherished me more than his own life. The “rules” are so confused now…
It really rang a bell with Buster, as I said earlier, and in thinking about this 25 year old picture, and men in general, I realized we don’t think of men as “protectors” any more. I guess the feminists have more or less trained society to think that women “don’t need protecting,” just as – apparently – women do not need to use some discretion in their alcohol consumption when they are (for example, at a frat party) surrounded by guys they do not know. While a girl drinking to excess is by no means an invitation to abuse and exploitation, by the same token, the world is not an innocent little arcade full of angels and fairies…a woman has to be smart about where she goes and with whom she surrounds herself. If something, God forbid, happens to her, the men are asked, “why didn’t you look out for her?”
Are teens just consumable goods, out there for the taking? What happened to building strong young men and women, good citizens, big thinkers? Does it even matter that you try to raise your kids in a good Christian home, with morals and values, staying involved in their school & activities, giving them to God each day to protect from evil?
Gagdad Bob says (read the whole thing!):
At bottom, what the [sixth] commandment is emphasizing is that life is sacred–it is of infinite value; therefore, do everything you can to honor and protect it. Clearly, not all cultures do so. Some, as in so much of the Muslim world, worship death, not life. And this inversion is reflected throughout these sick cultures, in that they are “fruitless.” That is, they produce nothing but misery, both to themselves and to others. They produce nothing for the body, i.e., no medicines, no new ways to produce food; they produce nothing for the mind, i.e., no science, no translations of books, no freedom of inquiry; and they produce nothing for the spirit, i.e., only the spiritual shackles of their medieval death cult.
Most soul murders are undoubtedly committed by those who are already so spiritually damaged as to be functionally dead. These undead souls such as a Nasrallah, an Arafat, or an Amahdinejad, speak to us from “the other side,” from the shadow world that is created when the soul has been so damaged that it essentially exits the body, leaving only a human animal in its place. But other demonic energies rush in to fill the void, so that the individual becomes a sort of “antihuman.” At their core, they are filled with unbearable envy toward the living, and the only way they can assuage this envy is to kill and kill plentifully. Life is a reminder of their own walking death, hence, “death to Israel,” that primordial symbol of life: l’chaim.
The undead also cannot help converting their children to their way of non-being. In ways both subtle and profound, they will interact with their children in a pathological manner, causing the children to internalize the same virus that afflicts their parents. Regardless, the virus always goes by the name of “love,” which simply further confuses the child. In the end, they will not be able to distinguish the difference between love and hate or truth and lies, any more than they can distinguish between life and death.
That depraved Muslim couple that was going to use their baby as a bomb surely love their child, except that the love flows out of death, not life. Likewise, the proud Palestinian parents who raise their children to be mass murderers undoubtedly love their children, as do the Muslim parents who murder their daughters for holding hands with a Christian boy. Death loves, just as the person who doesn’t believe in truth seeks to accumulate “knowledge.” Our universities are filled with lie-roasted academia nuts who know much. They too worship death–the death of the intellect and its innate spiritual wisdom.
In this cultural nightmare, how do I raise my boy to be The Man? To honor and to cherish not only women, but life and the human race? To love God and country? Is there enough prayer in this frail jar of clay to keep him on the right path? He’s been in high school only two weeks and already the dread looms over me like a dark cloud. Just HOW do I do this?
Like the Tin Man said “Now I know I have a heart….because it’s breaking…”
UPDATED: Even more from MaxedOutMama:
The best thing a mother raising a daughter can do in this society is to teach her to be virtuous, and to make demands of herself to do the right thing towards others. Then, and only then, will the daughter become an adult woman who is capable of recognizing and appreciating a fine man. Because decency is hard. Decency is a struggle! Trying to live a decent life is an epic adventure much more praiseworthy and admirable than climbing Mount Everest. Anyone who tries it will find that out, and in light of the knowledge of her own failures to live up to her own standards will then be able to appreciate the attempt in a man.
Here’s the truth: If women want virtuous men, then they need to publicly say that, and live out that truth in their own lives. If women want abusive, useless men, then the best way to produce them is to announce that all men are untrustworthy and vaguely sinister addictions against which every enlightened woman should be on guard. In our public culture, women treat men as if they are food addictions, and constantly go on anti-male diets, fearful that an extra pound of male-appreciation might creep into their psyches and wreck their superbly lean and mean naked-psyche profile in the vast, bathic, confessional world of Oprah, hallowed be her name.
The same can be said for both girls AND boys. God help us all!
Obi's Sister 