In Troubled Waters

I feel as though I must temporarily put aside my personal feelings about this community to write about a subject that has been in recent press.

The actions taken in Colorado by two boys have captured the attention of a nation, a nation accustomed to point the blame at someone who was never involved with the initial incident. In recent days, we've seen music, video games, and other forms of entertainment blamed as the reason why events like those of Colorado occur in this world. I intend to put that straight. I realize the odds of people outside of those who will agree with me seeing or reading this are slim, but word of mouth has done odder things.

People have begun asking what is wrong with the world. And when they look out, they see Marilyn Manson, DOOM, and violent movies. How many people, when asking what is wrong with the world, have looked at themselves? Few. And perhaps therein lies the problem.

Follow my train of thought, although it may not be a popular one. I believe in God. Perhaps not the way you do, but all religions believe in a form of God. And God is the supreme being in them all. Now to some of you, that may seem a rather silly statement to make at the onset of this, but it's necessary to examine what is meant by supreme being.

For a long time, we have believed that human potential is limitless. We are capable of unlimited experiences and growth. Wrong. We are limited. We cannot surpass the supreme being. Infinity plus 1 is greater that infinity, but it's not possible, by the definition of a supreme being, because supreme being plus 1 voids the definition of supreme being. Infinity assumes limitlessness, but supreme assumes a limit. You cannot be greater than the greatest if you acknowledge that there is a ceiling. God is that ceiling.

So lets take that argument. Since there is a limit, everything is relative. Some people are closer to the ceiling than others. When you start off, your level is at zero. You know nothing, you have experienced nothing, therefore you are empty. This is how a baby is brought into the world. They know nothing when they are born and begin learning. This is how we begin life. We are blank slates, ready to be molded by our parents.

Here is where the process fails due to modern day psychology. The idea that children are free-thinking little adults is, excuse my french, bullshit. A child of any age is not capable of the same level of thought as their parents are, whether this child is 5 or 15. You do not magically stop learning at 18 or 21. You continue learning. When your parents where your age, they were the approximately the same way. It's wholly possible they were further along or a bit behind than you, but generally they were at the same level as you. Now at the level your parents (or almost anyone older for that matter) are a lot closer to the ceiling than you. What does that mean? It means that at any age, you are dumber than your parents. A 40 year old child of a 70 year old parent is still a child, regardless his age. Age has no factor in this except in a relational factor.

The modern day idea began about thirty years ago, when the adults of today were children in their own right. This is what happened in the 1960's, with the Hippie Movement. There's a reason the children of the 60's are called the Me Generation. It was themselves who they were concerned with: what can I get. The Hippie movement was not about peace or anything else. They were fighting for respect, and it was ill-deserved. What you had were arrogant children, averaging 18 to 25, who believed they knew more than their parents. Wrong. We age for a reason, we are meant to grow with age. And the more you have aged, the more you have grown (at least this is what normally happens). Who were these kids thinking that in their 25 years, they'd learned 50 years worth of life's experiences enough to demand to be treated as equals? They were arrogant, and they were wrong. But people agreed with them, and thus was born the modern day practice of allowing a child to express themselves.

After all, if their expression did not affect you, was it really so wrong? Yes.

We have, in this modern day society, lost of the notion of right and wrong. Everything is okay, everything is allowable because who are we to say what's good and what's not. Here is another piece of the puzzle, we've lost the sense of right and wrong. Yes, we know what is right and what is wrong. It is right to help a fellow person and it is wrong to club them over the head for sheer thrill. But we no longer wish to condemn wrong actions because, after all, who are we to judge. Yes, they were bad people 30 years ago, 60 years ago, even 3000 and 6000 years ago. But back then, the good people kept the bad people out. How do we decide who is good and who is bad? Back then people practiced religion, and religion teaches morality. Each religion teaches a different set of morals, but each one does teach how to live your life correctly and how to not live life. In Christianity and Judaism, we have the Ten Commandments, which by legend were inscribed by God himself. Among these are Thou Shalt Not Kill, and Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery. Well, the latter has been smashed to pieces by the actions of our President, so perhaps it's not wrong anymore. Wrong. Adultery is wrong. Religion is meant to be old and archaic. It prevents future generations from changing it to fit their wishes. You can create new religions if you wish, but there is right and wrong there also. Satanism is a religion, but it's not a good religion, it's a bad religion. Therefore, this practice should be abolished. How is it a bad religion? Because it does not adhere to the set of common morals every person has in them. Everyone knows it's wrong to steal, it's an instinctual knowledge we have. So now we have two ways to measure right and wrong: instinctual morality, and religious morality.

We no longer use either method. Instead, everything is okay because you should be allowed to express yourself. Well, I want to express my beliefs that all black people are aliens and should be dragged into streets and inserted into mulchers because that is what I feel we should do. Good or bad expression of my freedom of speech? Bad. Very bad. Why? Because it allows murder, something that is contrary to religious morality.

What a simple application of morality. Now should that expression be allowed to survive? No, we should eliminate it. And here come the cries of freedom of speech. It's simple. Freedom requires vigilance. A black person is free to live life, and that expression interferes with that freedom, therefore a black person must be vigilant of such expressions and defend themselves against it all costs.

So now we have established the second component missing. We are no longer vigilant of how our rights are misused, and therefore could be taken away. Freedom of speech is a great freedom, but we must police ourselves and others in exercises of that freedom, otherwise we could lose the value it has. Add that to the inability to condemn wrong, even in minutiae, and we are living in a self-centered and uncaring society. And there's the root of the situation.

Parents are becoming increasingly more and more apathetic. Now this isn't just affecting parents, it's affected everyone and parents, although some children would question it, are still human. In how modern children are being raised lies the problem to all these eruptions of reality. Since parents are self-centered and worried about themselves more than anything else, they leave the child to raise itself. This develops a logic glitch in children since the child assumes that the parent lets them make decisions because the child is aking the same decisions as a parent. Now we have a child who believes it's wiser than its years and there's the problem. A child, when presented with adult situations, will not know what to do because it is not ready to deal with them. And sometimes, they react in the manner those children in Denver did.

How can we repair the damage done? People need religion. It does have a part in the modern day, because it's lack of religion that allows acts like this to occur. We need to recognize that we, as children of our parents, will not reach their levels until we are their ages. This takes some swallowing of pride, but pride goeth before the fall. We need to recognize what we are. And what we are is simple. We are children before God, because He was the Father of everything we see.

Once we see what we are, we can begin to see where we are. How we behave ourselves in society does affect those around us. You can see the effect that some idiots like Dennis Rodman have on society are extremely negative, basically showing that if you care for yourself, it doesn't matter what people think. A great American hero, is he not?

I miss morality. I miss watching men open doors for women, something I find myself doing. I miss the common decency in people to know that some things are best left not said, regardless of your rights. We're becoming a society that has lost the ability to police ourselves. Is it really a shock that people act in the manner the two kids in Colorado did and don't realize it's wrong?

Of course not. After all, it was okay for our President to commit perjury.

-DUK

This article is in no way exclusive to Doomworld. You are free to quote from it as you wish, but please email me if you decide to. Thank you.