Throughout the ages, we have accepted killing, violence, and violent behavior as just being a part of life - it's time we change!
By Ron Singer,
Guest Author Submitted 9 May 1999 by the Author
As a nation desperately searches for answers to the slaughter of our youths by warped, nihilistic, fellow students, the responsibility is being thrown around like a hot potato. And if the investigation which follows the massacre resembles those following the youth killings in Arkansas and Kentucky, then the nation will forget and remain deluded. For although the youths who planned and carried out the brutal assassinations are the perpetrators, it is the entire nation which has conspired to create the psychological environment in which these murderers played out their fantasy.
Only an understanding of the influences and the origin of the influences which motivated these youths will provide America with the opportunity which may change our destiny from sliding into decadence and dissolution to evolving into a nation which lives by brotherly love and emulates the principles of the professed Object of our nation’s trust.
The inalienable, American right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is being abused, along with the First Amendment right of free speech, to create vast private fortunes at the expense of our quality of life and even our lives. Instead of the pursuit of happiness we have the pursuit of wealth, power and pleasure. And protected by the First Amendment, we have iniquitous literature and broadcasts which attack our beliefs and often bypass our will power and influence our subconscious minds, leaving us legally impaired to function in our own best interests.
Edward R. Murrow, one of our greatest commentators, said, on reflecting on the influence of 50 years of television, " I can’t believe what we have done to our children ! " He realized, perhaps too late, that the influence of the media on fertile minds can supersede even the most traditional Judeo-Christian upbringing. By the time such books as "The Hidden Persuaders", and "Subliminal Seduction", were published in the 1970’s, any secrets about the receptivity of the human mind to overt and subliminal influence were revealed.
Laws prohibited advertisers from slipping ad footage between the frames of movie footage because the undetectable ads were incredibly effective in influencing the cinema audience to purchase precisely that product being advertised. American newspapers and magazines, however, were allowed to continue to lace their advertising with powerful, subliminal messages. Though Canadian laws prohibited all media from taking such unfair advantage of its citizens, American justice unfortunately allowed greedy newspaper and magazine publishers to transgress a higher law which forbids us to place a stumbling block before the blind. Consequently, American marketing campaigns were permitted what amounts to unlawful entry into our minds and caused legal impairment of our citizens.
Similarly, movie and pornography moguls were given lawful protection under the First Amendment right of free speech to bombard our minds with a barrage of images and samples of lifestyles unfit for upstanding human beings.
There has also been an attack on our traditional values and role models. A brief history of our media indicates that cinema and television audiences enjoyed the stories which had traditional heroes and heroines. Buster Keaton, Tyrone Power, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore entertained the entire world as they gained stardom in the infant movie industry. The next generation of heroes continued in the same tradition. Yul Brynner played the swashbuckling pirate Jean LaFit, who repented of his crimes and became an American hero who helped save New Orleans in the War of 1812. Charlton Heston played one of the greatest heroes of all time, Moses, in the Ten Commandments. The Lone Ranger galloped from the radio studio to Hollywood in a chase to protect the innocent from the greed and malicious attacks of the unlawful. Equally heroic were the adventures of the Cisco Kid and Pancho, Roy Rogers, Buck Rogers, Gene Autry, Hoppalong Cassidy and Superman, Davy Crockett, and Daniel Boone.
For thousands of years, from Homer’s Odyssey to Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan, the classical hero was a popular and profitable commodity. Why then did our cinema and TV producers begin the age of the anti-hero. Was the classical hero too much for their envious, self-serving egos to tolerate ? Did the starlets begin to fall in love with the image of the hero and spurn the rapacious advances of the producers ? We may never understand the how and why of the phenomenon, but what we were watching was a denigration of the classical hero, the values he embodied as well as a libelous attack on his motivation and his essence. The jerk; the ego-centric, narcissist; the cute coward were now the role models for our children. The film industry was now educating our children to believe that such self-serving anti-heroes as the Woody Allens, the Fonzes, and the Frank Sinatras were attractive to the loveliest ladies and the ones to be emulated.
By the time Hollywood buried the classical hero, the homosexuals started coming out of their closets. And with them came an assault on the very archetypes of manhood and heroism. With the help of the psychotherapeutic community, it was decided that men in professions which called upon self-sacrifice and heroism in the performance of their duties were actually latent homosexuals manifesting a reaction formation which led them to choose their respective occupations. The message to our youngsters was that if they had a noble and altruistic drive to serve their communities as firemen, peace officers, or soldiers; or if they had an inclination to enter manly professions and become truckers, sailors, or builders; there was some homosexual problem they were hiding. Defense of such choices made these young men all the more suspect. The message of the homosexuals to young males and females was that all men were fundamentally homosexual and that the real men were man enough to admit it. Catch - 22 : if you’re a man you’re essentially self-serving and homosexual; if you evince altruism or nobility or manliness you’re a liar who is disguising his innate homosexuality.
This stunning victory of evil was followed by other victories in a clever campaign with very deep origins. Hollywood did resurrect the hero, but in an aberrant form emulating Nimrod, the archetypal conqueror of old. Instead of the optimistic, other centered, noble and steady character they broadcast the smirking, selfish, indulgent, moody, vain, and violent terminators who identified with and enjoyed their violence. Honor, reverence, respect, love and romance were transmogrified into insolence, arrogance, vulgarity, recreational sensual gratification, and power.
Dr. Spock, the famous doctor whose books were guides to permissiveness in raising youngsters during this assault on our values, made an about face in the mid 1980’s. 20 million children later he said he was wrong. He did not however, suggest a recall of his books. And the psychologists and sociologists who assured a skeptical public in the late 1960’s that legalizing pornography and prostitution would minimize violent sex crimes never even bothered to acknowledge their guilt. After their incorrect advice, violent sex crimes grew much more prevalent and more gruesome. It is worth noting that at a number of the annual conferences of the American Psychological Association, it was stated that no particular system or method of therapy could be proven to be beneficial to the patient. It was only the human contact with the individual therapist which could be considered beneficial. In a secular humanist environment the therapist is often helping a patient to feel good about something which is illegal according to the laws of the Creator of mankind. If the treatment works, it is right. When therapists restore faith that living by the Creator’s principles leads to feeling good, to happiness, to confidence and to loving and satisfying social and business relationships of all kinds then they will be doing the job we pay them to do.
Not only Hollywood and our professionals are to blame for our tragedies. The owners of our nation’s cinemas have a motto, "You can’t go broke under estimating the taste of the public". The game industry has a share in the blame as well. When we went to the Penny Arcade in the 1950’s and 60’s, the most violent game presented a bear or duck to be shot with a rifle shooting a beam of light. Today’s host of violent computerized games allow children to experience the emotional context of violence until, for those at risk; i.e., children who have experienced parental neglect and see themselves as victims of the outside world; such freedom of violent expression seems a normal way of ventilating their frustrations and overcoming their passivity. In cases where parental neglect impairs the development of the neo-cortex which controls feelings of belonging and attachment, children have difficulty empathizing and the repetition of violent images develops a great part of their world view. These games along with violent movies brain wash the individual with the subliminal and overt message that such expressions are just another part of reality. Today, education from home or church or school cannot compete with this overwhelming influence, and therefore youth violence is becoming a growing reality.
The origins of our problem with youth is ancient yet pertinent. The biblical proverbs teach us that the citizens of a nation which loses its vision cast off all restraint. American children today are learning to incorporate the values of ancient self - serving and exploitative villains. The pharaoh of ancient Egypt, by challenging the commands of the Creator of the universe, was saying that there was no god, but him; and that his ego-centric, arrogant and epicene expression of life was to be both venerated and emulated. And what he wills, he does. Lacking empathy and compassion, he believed that all the people in his country were at his disposal and for his benefit. And he granted favors to those whose sycophantic approaches pleased his fancy at the moment. To him, truth, justice and righteousness were a mythology.
This divine right of kings found its way throughout history in the courts of kings and clergy alike. In the court of Louis the 15, whose reign ended one year prior to the start of the American Revolution, power was dictated by effeminately and ornately attired men who paraded around like spoiled, jaded females. And like their counterparts in other lands and ages, these elitist lords saw people as toys to be exploited for their egotistical purposes.
The courageous pilgrims who fled to America and South Africa in the 1600’s were escaping the dehumanizing tyranny of such decadent kings, lords and clergy. And when the king of England demanded greater taxes from hard working colonists in America, the people organized themselves and drafted a Declaration of Independence and later a Constitution which gave the world a new republic with government by law and not by tyrannical fancy. (Of course it took another couple of hundred years to root out the psychological vestiges of tyranny left over from their old world heritage. So not all people were granted their inalienable rights until quite recently.)
Unless the bombardment of our minds with violence, pornography and tasteless filth is stopped, our smut lords will grow richer and more powerful and most of us will grow more foolish and weak. I for one am not in favor of legislating laws which will probably just convert cheap filth into an expensive forbidden fruit. However, there is a time for the use of law and punishment to protect the citizens of a nation from predators. When freedom of speech becomes freedom to legally impair the psyche and will of an entire generation, it is time for the courts to act in defense of our children and our traditional belief system which builds their characters.
But what if the courts fail us ? Judges have human weaknesses too and in 1963, even the supreme Court made an error so grave that it too is partially responsible for the massacre at Columbine High School. In the name of separating religion from state, the judges equated God with religion and dismantled the sacred relationship of God and country. Our ancestors came to America to worship God freely not to escape their Divine responsibilities; yet in 1963, He was formally exiled from the nation ! The German rational school of the 1820’s, which brought us false proof that their is no Creator and that we are simply more intelligent than other animals, won a stunning victory in 1963. Their missionaries, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, who were heroes in Russia would now become heroes in America as well. Communism not only destroyed the work ethic of a nation, it destroyed the belief in God. Russia today has cast off all restraint and egotism and chaos reign in their new free society. Without the fear of God or the hope of His blessings murders and other crimes are growing more prevalent.
As America continues to learn that God and atheism are equal and merely a matter of free choice, then many of our children will grow into ego-centric pleasure seekers without the traditional values of our forefathers or grandparents. And lacking character, they will gravitate to those positions which can provide the means to satisfy their appetites. They will work for the entertainment industry and brain wash more children. They will package and advertise imports made by children in other lands who would jump at the chance to work in one of America’s infamous sweatshops. They will work in industries which destroy the very earth which supports us all. And they will turn a blind eye at the investments they make if they earn money from such socially irresponsible enterprises. They will produce a heartless society which is ruled by the arrogant and for the arrogant. They will mask their slavery to pleasure with insolence and vulgarity. And in the privacy of their own thoughts, power and pleasure will be more important than happiness, family and community.
Today’s corporate mergers are not done with our society in mind any more than the cartels of yesterday had the public in mind. These along with the secret commercial societies of Cecil Rhodes and Queen Victoria are simply another manifestation created by the Nimrods and pharaohs which reside in the hearts of ego-centric people. No anemic educational diet depleted of moral fiber and traditional values can sustain the America of our dreams. And when governmentally protected commercial giants use the Constitution to turn us into the same decadent societies our forefathers left, then the Nimrods and pharoahs will again be our rulers, but with one ironic twist. Since we can vote for the candidate of our choice we will delude ourselves into thinking that we still have our freedom when in fact all the parties will be invested in the same corruption of our nation’s soul. And the only real difference between communism and democracy will be our potential and the few remaining family farms and businesses that refuse to profit from our corrupted appetites. The only prayer America has for saving our children from violence, and bestiality, and our nation as well, is to use our remaining, unperverted freedom of choice to simply say, "No !", to our smutlords. This will be a revolution which guarantees a new birth and will promote the success of honorable industries and businesses and at the same time creates a safe environment for our children to grow and find careers where they won’t have to develop slavish infatuations w/power and corruption. The power of our collective moral choice can take the profit out of any individual or industry which transgresses the bounds of moral decency. If the fear of God doesn’t stop such exploitation then the fear of financial suicide will.
But America will have to remember to be Americans again and stop being a nation of weak fools exploited by the same power lords who have exploited people since the time of the pharaohs.
If we fail to return to our true selves and create this revolution, then the power lords will exploit us until our addictions to their trash become so irresistible that we will no longer enjoy the liberty of being a nation free to live and receive the blessings of our Creator.
Only a revitalized moral and spiritual diet can save us from decadence, disenchantment and violence. And while we transform the diet for our minds we have to look at how the diet for our bodies is responsible for our troubles. When elementary school children are fed colas containing caffeine which excites their nervous system, how can we then scold them for not paying attention and acting wildly ? We allow a greedy meat and dairy industry to teach them that they need lots of meat, fish and dairy, which are contaminated with dangerous chemicals, to develop strong bones and muscles, when in truth grains, vegetables and legumes are healthier and allow them to be more balanced mentally and emotionally. Dave Scott a five time Iron Man Tri-athelete champion is vegan, i.e., he eats no meat, fish or dairy. And the ancient Chinese would not teach kung-fu to a meat eater because it made people violent. Mental illness is sometimes directly related to a junk diet. And five cups of coffee a day can give a person the symptoms of an anxiety neurosis. Switching to a vegetarian diet can give children greater control of their emotions so they can better restrain themselves from negative impulses and overcome their difficulties sensibly.
America, Columbine High School is a tragic symptom of our growing alienation from truth and its Author. We have fallen from the republic ruled by law to a democracy ruled by a majority who are ruled by egotism, greed, self-indulgence and the ancient desire to control and exploit. If Columbine becomes our national wake - up call, then we may yet survive. If we continue to explain away our national disasters as the acts of nature or the acts of crazed individuals then we will continue to ignore the writing on the wall and invest our resources on better police forces. Even Pogo knows that the enemy is us ! Before the German rationalist school the world’s teachers and scientists were also theologians. Most modern scientists believe in the Creator, as a matter of fact, their work often strengthens their belief. And many like Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer advocated a vegetarian way of life. Our educational system will forever remain inferior and educate our children to be the drones of the smutlords until we transform it. The nihilistic spirit of the German rationalist school of thought not only gave us Marx and Darwin, it also gave us Hitler. A Godless society or one which pays mere lip service to Divine laws will simply perish from this earth. Just look at history.
America was intended to be a new order in the Creation, a nation where the human spirit could soar within the realm of Divine law and Providential blessing. The educational system for our country needs to include the heritage of moral and spiritual laws. While religion should be separate from our state schools and institutions, Divine principles and how to practically apply them to our lives should become apart of our children’s education. If we have been teaching an atheistic world view since 1820, there is no reason why we can’t incorporate what most of our scientists know, i.e., that there is a God, that He created the universe, all its life forms, and made man in his image. And if we use our intelligence we will see that unless we adopt a moral and spiritual approach to what we consume with our minds and our stomachs, we will simply waste yet another opportunity for mankind to rise to its higher state.
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