Encountering Fads

Human beings are rather easily bored, and they tend to counter that unwanted context in various ways, some helpful and some seriously damaging to self and society.  Many fads are harmless carrying little meaning, while others hang on for decades changing in this or that emphasis as may be dictated by business value, celebrity accent, or even an important value orientation that becomes a part of a culture – lifting or diminishing persons and cultures.  A fad refers to a fashion.  When the trial period (fad) is over, and the factor is adopted by a significant number of persons it becomes a fashion (some factors are dropped and others retained).  When the fashion period passes and there is residue, the residue becomes culture that is large enough to be identified as change in society – in that society is affected by it.  In the course of this process, and since we are fully occupied in our time, we drop some factors so to make room for the new.

Some of the fads of my lifetime have included hair, clothing, music, religion, discipline, architecture, education, products, and the list is long.  In hair the permanent has yielded first to the bob, and then to long straight hair for the ladies of white skin, standard cuts for both genders in the men and women of color, to Afro, to corn rows, to shaved, to short trim with variations.  In my childhood there was an attempt to get all boys to part their hair in the middle.  (It failed and is now used as a means for representing a rube.)  Facial hair moved from shaved, to mustaches, to beards, and back again, until at this writing the mixture of the shaved and bearded.  Dances moved from the Charleston through a number of styles, especially ballroom dancing – all of which lost some attention with the gyrations of Presley and the skillful shuffle of Jackson.  Dancing with the Stars is the current rage with gymnastic furry.  Grooming became part of the fads.

Music held well for the classics, in the variant styles of composers and directors until the popular approaches of jazz, country, western emerged opening the way for rock and roll so to reduce music to the common denominator of the public not schooled or leaving much room for refinements of classical formation.  Romantic music appealed along the way until Presley and the Beatles changed the context to physical participation in the audience.  This was partly achieved in the early days by hiring teen-age girls to scream at rock music concerts. The activity caught on and continues, even with some recent decline, when slight invitation is unneeded.  Clothing has been a significant factor through the fad processes.  A series of steps reduced the suit with shirt, tie, vest with matching jacket and trousers, well presented in fit and ironed finery – to casualness that uses denim, loose shirts extending below a casual sweater with all suggesting that no serious attention was given to the meaning of grunge wear, including sweat markings, even in semi-formal contexts.  The decline in the standard clothing wear has carried over to decline in interest in reading, in serious conversational language, in the manner in which we eat – and so the story goes.  There is no serious reason to believe that we will escape faddism.  Even some crime follows it in the graffiti history, the crimes against children, then to shootings in high schools, and currently to this writing in colleges, and even fad patterns of collegians in fraternities.  The humane way in developing maturity and finding the beauty and miracle of life with its elevated achievements is lost or diluted in a lot of tom-foolery that dilutes us, especially in youth, from becoming the persons we were meant to become – in finding ourselves in our families, perhaps in our careers, and extending a legacy that honors our names, perhaps also of God’s name, that improves society. 

Given our unwillingness to find help in becoming all that we can be in culture and giving so much time to stimulation in shallow shifting, we are not likely going to find the persons we ought to become in the course of miraculous life and the God of holiness.  The opportunity is present and here for the taking.  Even our churches have fallen in the casualness that has taken society.  We know from the polls and studies that Christians are not as informed about biblical concepts of life, even in what the Bible verses we quote have to teach.  Popular culture has not treated us well.  We take courage for purpose in a free society.