Beware; I’m in one of “those” moods tonight. Just read in the trivia section of an Internet Movie Database entry a listing of the number of times the word, “fuck”, is used in a particular movie. While I may decry censorship I see no reason why the arts should be used as a vehicle to inure the public to that which is considered crude in polite society. I also fail to see why it is necessary to portray on screen, acts that are by their very nature considered private. Okay, maybe I’m prudish about these things but so is society. On the one hand we graphically portray violence, sex, and cruelty in movies and on the other we “X” Rate them, meaning that everyone who attends them must pay an adult entrance fee. Psychiatrists treat the witnessing of the “primal scene” by children as a traumatic event in Western Society while the 80 % of the world that lives in one-room huts goes on producing babies somehow.
It matters not whether a disembodied voice thundered the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai or incised them in tablets with a laser-like hand; they were enshrined in the Bible because they made good sense. They made such good sense that rabbinical scholars wrote 600 closely-packed pages of interpretations called the Talmud. The spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases tends to prove that intimate relations outside of a committed relationship are not good for one. How many are treated for premature ejaculation because their first sexual experience was learned in the back seat of a car or in a family room attempting to evade detection? The fellow worker who espoused the “3 W’s”—whip it in, whip it out, wipe it off—is presently without spouse.
The most important improvements to overall health were not made in 12-hour open-heart surgeries but in basic sanitation, clean drinking water, and proper nutrition; in fact the death rate actually decreases when doctors go on strike. The present generation now reaching maturity will be the first in a century that will have a shorter life-expectancy than their parents. This is almost totally due to lack of exercise and obesity; both eminently preventable conditions. We need to stop visiting our doctors for a pharmalogical cure to all our ills and start taking responsibility for our own health. The same can be said for our mental, spiritual, and moral health.
While I’m not going to say that everyone should attend church on Sunday it is no coincidence that suicide among people who regularly went to confession was virtually unknown. I’m not out to convert the world to my particular brand of Christianity; but I do believe that everyone needs a sense of self-worth, their place in the world, and a feeling that their life has meaning. It is when people can only define their sense of their own importance in terms of the people to whom they feel superior that prejudice and injustice become acceptable. What I find objectionable about the increasing use of foul language, violence, sexual predation, and obscenities in movies, TV, video games, music, and everyday life is the fact that increased exposure tends to make the average person find them increasingly acceptable. That’s the same slippery slope that had the Romans watching the games at the Coliseum while the Huns invaded the hinterland and eventually sacked Rome.
