We wonder where we are in the wholeness of culture and the universe. What is the truth about life, character, meaning, conduct, and several other human factors in evaluating who we are and what we are as individuals, as a nation of citizens, as the tribe of created persons responsible to God? Are we what we display, or are we what we are in secret? We are compounds of all the factors that we are, both good and ill, but the tilt ought to be firmly toward the good in fact and direction. Persons may fall into ambivalence about life directions, and their rights of choices.
Those who know about such things inform us that there is an undercurrent economy that rivals the respectable – that the traffic in drugs, sex/pornography, and migrant (exploited) labor is, in fact, as great as any legal marketing we know about. Some of it may not be illegal, but is unsavory. It all comes out to more than a trillion dollars a year in the United States – by current values. That is a thousand billion dollars. Nearly every community is touched significantly by the ugliness, even death, by the debilitation of these and other insinuations on social/personal rightness and respectable community. Several years ago, a great tree hundreds of years old and a national treasure was rescued from commercial chain saws. Shortly after conservationists succeeded in their aim, the tree fell. It was discovered to have been eaten by termites until it could no longer stand. Had it been cut down, it would have been left to rot where it fell. On an occasion I went out of my way to drive through another tree in California that had been tunneled out to permit cars to drive through. I have heard that the tree is now gone, so weakened by the intrusion of man that it died. Age must have contributed to the loss, if it is now a thing of man’s past aberrations.
Some of the damage that slowly escalates to distort the life of a society is termite damage. It comes from uninvited sources, both in individual and group actions. We do damage ourselves, first in our choices. The proud Greeks and Romans went through the process many centuries ago. We see it. We know about it. But we have not learned well enough. The family is endangered, but we continue to hollow out the trunk of the family base. The number of divorces is excessive, and the number of cohabiting couples has increased several times since 1960. The quality of the expressions of our culture has declined. Lyrics in much popular music are appalling. One song recites a lonely and empty sound: We have a physical thing. We’ll make love, but don’t fall in love. These artists are praised for their talent. I have searched for the alleged talent, and do not find it. The acts are held together by entertainer and audience in some physical activity, by flashing lights, production techniques, a strong beat, and oddities of dress, or undress. There is so little that causes listeners and participants to rise, entertained to aspire. What ennobles us in this art? What is accomplished? Stories of the entertainers often relate to oddities, even drugs to death.
So it is that, from within and without, the basics of a healthy society (like good habits, the nurture of families, the quality of the arts and entertainment, the education of mind and conduct, the recognition of the righteousness of God afforded to us) are in dilution or lost. Dilution is the road to loss. Dilution becomes a form of decay toward death becoming like self-inflicted abuse in persons and society. The ends thereof are marked by the death of something that we need in culture and the communication of it. The music, the paintings, the sculpture, the writings, the architecture, and any form of art, including dress, entertainment, and civic holidays ought to have in them the communication of values and meaning of social celebration. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020