Missed Opportunities to Tell the Moral of the Story - and Teach Our Kids

"It seems these days there is something about almost everything that should be criticized boldly in the face of widespread denial." - James G. Mason.

Father James on a Moralistic Bender 

The following is a moralistic jump into the air, waving my hands about to get your attention on an issue I find relevant to all of us. This style of opinion is a common theme for an editorialist. It is a form of an outlet of frustration and one of the least admitted reasons many editorialists write. If you read the same writer's opinions regularly I think you'll find this generalization a truism. So here I jump! 

~~~~~~~ 

We are a country that will proliferate vast amounts of news articles about a Hollywood star's latest inappropriate behavior as entertainment news and let it pass as such. We simultaneously present our politician's public mistakes also as entertainment and we largely react by pretending we don't ever act like that and then we let the absurd sound bites pass as careless mistakes to be forgotten quickly.

We let those celebrities incidents and political brain-farts become old news fast without dissecting the moral within the story and  then not explaining to our kids why that inappropriate behavior was news to begin with. Worse, we tend to not seek consequences for many actions we see, we let them pass without a moral to the story.

It's not that moral escapes us, it's uncomfortable to us to explore behavior we all know most of us are capable of and many of us have done ourselves. And when a thing is vastly entertaining we adapt to immorality within those forms of entertainment. So before we know it, the previously immoral is normal behavior. 

We are the nation that just allowed a multi-billion dollar national sport to step two rungs down the ladder of morality because we loved it so much and the Super Bowl was coming. "Well it's a mystery to me," we said collectively. Then we watched the game in record numbers and we emptied our wallets and drove up our credit card bills for that entertainment, despite. In denial we evaded a moral moment to have a great discussion.

Before that most recent sporting news we allowed college students to play a football play-off game in the context of a multi billion dollar producing entertainment medium several days after numerous horrific indictments of that team's coach and mentor's very disgusting and very immoral actions against children were loudly proclaimed to us. Some students wore special colored t-shirts for that televised game to show they cared - so that was okay to our comfort seeking minds.

These publicly personal mistake stories and each of these recent events, that were truly entertainment were surrounded by days and weeks of time of missed opportunities to face our morality in the wind of a public storm of denial. Opportunities to present consequences.

It would have been very uncomfortable to actually take action to demonstrate consequences for immorality or even to revisit and prolong our discomfort to learn and to teach our young. 

Now I'll pretend that we did the right thing for each of those occurrences above. Because I also love to write fiction especially when it has an important moral to the story. 

Celebrity news: Beginning with using celebrities personal mistakes as way of then explaining to our kids; "Kids, sometimes adults show us who they really are inside. They get drunk or they get emotional for other reasons and then say and do things that your and I should never do or say. So, when you hear about a star doing something like that it's because we need to learn a lesson from those public mistakes. The lesson is usually keep your ugly thoughts to yourselves and protect your dignity and the perception that every one else has of you." 

The Penn State coach child molestations: "You see kids stopping that game from being played that week was very important because we must see big consequences for big wrong things that people do. Sometimes those consequences need to be shown to every one all at once in a big way. Especially when something really bad happens to children. So that's why that play-off game never happened and that's why the Penn State football program was shut down for a year." 

The mysteriously under inflated footballs: We may have had to explain to our boys who also love the sport of football that "We had to cancel that Super Bowl because adults can be great cheaters too and it's very wrong. And we needed to share the consequences of that with the whole world.  So that maybe, you and  your friends wouldn't grow-up to be a person like that.  A person who seeks sneaky advantages when they think no one will find out."

  

Let's be brave when the next opportunity to explore our morality occurs. Lets be brave mentors to the future, our kids, our young adults and especially to the grown-ups by facing that uncomfortable wind in our faces. Let's recognize when we enjoy a thing, we'll compulsively try to bury the immorality that may occur within that thing.

Copyright Reserved: James G Mason, Feburary, 2015.

#amwriters #weblogs #morality #opinion #editorial #MoralStory