Silence Violence

Forget Iraq. (Well, just for a minute). We have problems here at home. We need more body armor for all the little troops who go to the NBA basketball games with their parents. We need more body bags for our Heavy Metal rock concerts. Our Hip Hop award ceremonies are more dangerous than the Sunni Triangle. We have a whole generation of undisciplined homo sapiens, raised on theories like evolution, that are now going bananas.

We have witnessed "basket-brawls" in our hoop domes.  We have seen bloodshed in our baseball stadiums.   We have witnessed so many "body checks" and "high sticks" at hockey games that they have become metaphors for success and are seen as just a part of doing business. There is fine line between "body checks," and "body counts." We have watched people eat worms and be buried in coffins filled with cockroaches on the Fear Factor, and Woman engage in social fist fights in order to win a Batchelor they hardly know in front of an national TV audience. As a society, we gather around the boob-tube to watch who will Survive this week and who will be sacrificed to the TV gods. We call it our Entertainment Industry, and it is one of the few industries we have left.

We have grown up with the "Terminator" and the violence of the big screen. It was only a matter of time before the violence on the large screen jumped to the little computer screen, and then to our hearts like a bird flu or virus, causing a pandemic of "pathetic" or (what the Governator himself called) "bad behavior." We have a generation of "Mean Girls" and yes, mean boys who will do whatever it takes not to be "voted off the island," win that million dollars, or be Donald Trump’s next Apprentice. We have a whole generation that thinks life is some Amazing Race , the goal of which is to win a million dollars; and woe to anyone who gets in its way.

We have become a "bread and circus" society that is as intoxicated as any that every sat in a Roman arena. We are saturated with media madness. If we are not cheering the wrestlers of the WWF we mesmerized by the latest white-Bronco car chase or murder trial. If we turn on the 6 O’clock News we might see surveillance tape of a recent riot among shoppers lining up at the local mall at 4AM to get first dibs at the "Special" stuff on sale, or the two women who fought tooth and nail over the last "Singing Elmo."

We have seen cheaters win gold medals, and mistake that for victory. We have worked hard at being bigger, better, and best - never stopping to think about the side effects of taking the steroids of success. We may run faster, throw harder, and hit more baseballs than generations gone by, but somehow it has made us "less" not "more." We may have better eye-finger coordination from playing Doom on our Video game-boys, but there will be no prizes for our generation unless we change our ways.

We have gone from analogue to digital, cable to wireless, and foolish to faithless. We are the generation that both fears violence and loves it at the same time. We are the generation that is fighting over where to put the Ten Commandments and the generation which put the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on DVD. We are watching what some have called the Greatest Generation die off one by one. We ourselves may go down in history as the Violent Generation (if there is a history). The louder the church yells, the less the world listens. The solution is not to turn up the volume of truth as much as it is to live it’s peace. To storm the courthouse or "stack the court" is tempting, but not the answer to all the violence. The Ten Commandments do not fit as well in the Constitution as much as they do in our hearts. And the cross was not made for the movies or to be worn proudly around our necks as much as it was given to pierce our hearts, heal our hurts, and make us humbly walk in peace.

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