HE-MAN Charge!

We tried; we honestly tried to keep our kids from guns and weapons when they were small. We didn’t give them the guns and holsters I had growing up, or the army GI Joe’s, etc. But what happened? We would look out the window and see our kids using sticks as guns and swords. A piece of wood became a weapon. Then there is the neighbors kids … who get a new HE-MAN sword for their birthday and the first thing they do with it is run to our house, yell “HE-MAN charge!” and whack my child over the head with it.

For my Master’s thesis, I did a survey where I asked this question:
Do you believe mankind is:
A] born good, is good, and will always be good
B] born good, corrupted by a bad world, needs to work to be good
C] born bad, is bad, needs outside help to be good
D] born bad, is bad, will always be bad

How would you answer that question? If you are like 80% of my 420 people surveyed, both Christian and non-Christian, you will have answered B. And, along with the 80%, you would have been wrong… Ouch, did I really say that out loud? 80% of the people I surveyed were wrong? Wow? That’s kind of gutsy because the answer is C, we NEED help to be good.

We have a nostalgic and naïve way of looking at ourselves. It is as if we look at ourselves in the mirror and squint so that we don’t see all the blemishes and imperfections. The fact is we are bad people; we have been born with a tendency to become even “badder.”

You don’t believe me? Then you must not have raised children. We lovingly gloss over their tendency to throw their food on the ground, to scream while shopping, and around others. Their first word tends to be “NO!” with emphasis. Now I can hear you arguing that their fits are a response to the way we raised them, they hit because we hit, they yell because we yell and so forth. To that I answer that I say “open your eyes!” We have had 30 years of this kind of garbage and yet few people have drawn the connection between this kind of thinking and what happened at Columbine and every high school in America.

Love without discipline leads to license, NOT to more love. Time to pull out the biblical values on raising children and to dust off that old copy of Lord of the Flies by Golding that is no longer even in most High School libraries.

www.themoralbusiness.com