Scatological

For several years into their lives children will follow what we may term: reaction conduct.  Much of it is cute, enhanced by the innocence, play, determination, animation, enjoyment, or pain, danger, damage, risk, and the like in all.  Seeing the response of older persons the child may even intensify the attitude and conduct in which the event is carried through.  A parent may rescue the child, or encourage continuance in the context of the event.  The scattered conduct pattern may have gotten attention from others.  Attention satisfying to the child is carried over to adult life.  Many adults continue the scattered pattern that fulfills emotional preferences into years when cerebral conduct is the standard pattern for the vast majority of the population.  Some of the aberrations can be casually accepted, but some of it cannot unless the society is willing to put-up with the inconvenience, tom-foolery, distractions, violations, dangers, waste, losses, even death-dealings that some developed and habitual aberrations offer.

Some deviations from the norms are not really dangerous to society.  They seem to be a threat to order in some instances as was the graffiti craze that lasted for some years and then abated.  The larger and neater society interested in the attractiveness of natural life, was bombarded with nonsense scribbling on the sides of busses, trains, fences, subways, and any other inviting public surface.  During my years the zoot suit (over-sized suits for youths) period and other extremes held interest, like stressed jeans, or spiked hair or jewelry excess during various eras.  The concept would sometimes catch on for products, as was the case during the few years that tail lights on cars were at the end of fins that served no purpose except to carry tail lights, and give an odd appearance to the traffic.  At this writing a biggie in nonsense distraction is tattooing, a procedure that seems to rise and fall in interest from decade to decade, once reserved for sailors.  A leading basketball player appears grotesque with his spiked hair, tattoos, and other adjustments to natural presentation that game viewers are not admiring prowess of a player, but distracted by oddity.

What is the point?  The point is that this tendency to scatological life that takes many persons can become dangerous not only in a community but in the world.  Currently, the world is faced by terrorism, which is not unusual during some eras in the sweep of history, and finding its way in the particular tools used by terrorists in this or that era.  It is discovered in the accumulations of gun totting persons killing in post offices, restaurants, schools, department stores, colleges, libraries and the open streets.  As this is being written several groups of toughs have taken over great swaths of land, alleging that they are fighting for God, they brazenly find ways of terrorizing the world.  Some brought down the towers in New York after the turn to the new millennium, bombed the Boston Marathon, and the story is lengthening to death and destruction.  They strut their way along, even taking credit for tragedies that others may have caused.

We might continue this scenario with the conduct of persons who are more sophisticated in their activity, but just as negative to society as the terrorists, breaking up homes, killing persons on the highways, joining the drug culture to the loss of lives and resisting the life of dignity and progress.  The better societies seem not to know how to manage what is intensifying at the moment, and may not go away soon enough.  If responsible nations were committed to the peace of God and society they could combine and in some order stop the mortal nonsense, but the lure of a kind of emotional deadly childishness in some persons to derangement would arise again.  There has been some improvement in the use of the ubiquitous cameras that appear nearly everywhere so to catchreality.  They are the eyes of mankind in reply, but the important factor for Christian perception is that God sees the panorama, and calls for the answer from us to pray and live rightly.  He will hear us.  We are to seek to solve problems, beginning with good parentage, belief in appropriate discipline and education that must include value orientation.  To function, under God, as we ought to function will lift from the world some of its terror with its unbelievable cost in life and resources.