Have We Come To This?
We all have daily rituals that we go through. In one phase of my morning ritual, I catch up on the news—the stuff that happened the previous day or during the wee hours of the present day. A few days ago, the secondary topic of the newscasters was, “Alex chose Amanda.” The story was based upon the series entitled “The Bachelor.” It’s hard to believe, they actually had twenty-five willing bachelorettes dated by one bachelor named Alex. One by one he eliminated his choices, which brought him down to Amanda. They interviewed the runner-up and you could truly see the pain she was experiencing. She said he told her the night before that she was the one. When Alex and Amanda were interviewed they was asked by Charlie Gibson of “Good Morning America” in so many words, due to some provocative glimpses of activities, just how far did they carry their intimacies. They, with coy smiles, refused to say. As if to say, farther than we saw in the bedroom of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
The real concern I have in the scenario is that it moves beyond scripting…it is an attempt to catch reality on film. As a matter of fact, there is a program entitled “Real TV.” Amazing isn’t it? We see people take the world of fantasy figures and play some serious games. Then they want some relaxation, and they now choose to have real people playing their fantasies out in front of them. Is there any wonder that one of the programs introduced to an amusement-crazy public is entitled “American Gladiator.”
In “The Bachelor” all I saw was a few last minutes when one girl drives up in a long stretch vehicle only to be told after all the interaction that she is not the one. She was one of twenty-four. I saw the tears and in my investigative spirit, I felt like an idiot because it started to pull at my heart. Then it occurred to me, it is only a show, only to find out after further investigation, it was not just a show. Somebody was indeed hurting. Then to find out that the girl who won, after sharing Alex with twenty-four others, is going to move to his home state to pursue this “catch.”
Well, I never got involved with any Survivors or Bachelor, nor do I intend to. I never saw an entire episode of any of this “entertainment,” only rather sickening vignettes of what is happening, which was more than I could handle. People have their personal identity paraded in front of a waiting world that, like Rome, give their thumbs up or down with the dilemmas that each real character faces.
So I ask you today, has it come to this? Do we enjoy seeing our fellow human beings hurt or made happy with a real-to-life situation? My mind is spinning with implications of what all this means. I recall from my youth seeing the advertisements of the famous movie, Gone With The Wind. One often seen picture is that of Clark Gable holding Vivian Leigh close to his face with the backdrop of Atlanta burning behind them. Very dramatic! That didn’t bother us, because after all it was a story; it wasn’t real. Let me give you some reality of that one scene. First of all, that wasn’t Atlanta burning; that was the set from a previous movie entitled King Kong. They burned the set of King Kong to simulate Atlanta burning. Another piece of useless trivia is that some of the actors that worked closely with Clark Gable said he had this incredible on-going battle with halitosis. So as you look again at another poster of Gable holding Leigh close to him, remember she may not have been caught up with his good looks as much as she was trying to hold her breath while he was near. Then if you are tempted to get overly involved with her heartbreak as Gable angrily walks out the door, remember the only truth to the closing scene were the words “tomorrow is another day.” To use Scarlet phraseology, “fiddly dee,” because when Vivian Leigh left the set she went home to her real life husband, Errol Flynn. So, big heart break, right? Wrong, because we all knew it was not real. It was an escape from reality.
Reality seems to be our escape from fantasy. But at what price? “Wow! Look! This guy plows into another automobile, while being chased by a policeman. Isn’t that cool?” Is it? Somebody was just injured. Someone was breaking some serious laws. And we are being entertained by it all?
Look at the word amusement. It comes from the root “muse.” One of the definitions is “to be in a state of deep thought.” The prefix “a” connotes “no” or “non.” So we come to this definition of amusement, “to be absent from a state of deep thought.” In America we seem to be amusing our selves to death. We think lightly of what reality really is. We view people hurt or immoral and we laugh, cry, and then wipe our mouth as the channel turns to more of the same. Are we anesthetizing our senses like the harlot who grows complacent toward her lifestyle? “Such is the way of an adulterous woman; she eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness” (Proverbs 30:20).
Think carefully to the two most horrendous events of American history that happened less than three years apart. The Columbine School massacre by two teenage boys and the tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Let this go beyond your cerebral comprehension to this reality. The sad reality of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold is that they had access to video games that in fantasy did what they did in reality. They went so far as to dress in exactly the same way, with the long black coats, brandishing beneath them, assault weapons and then following out just like in a movie where a famous actor shot his schoolmates. The fantasy became reality. The day after 9/11, a well-known video game marketer took off of the shelves a game that, are you ready for this, depicted planes flying into the towers of the New York Trade Center. It was taken off the shelves, because now it really happened!
If this is the air our children breathe, then it’s time for a fresh breath. If this is the water they swim in, it’s time to change the water. How is this for some fresh mountain air? “But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels” (Hebrews 12:22). Spurgeon and the old divines would sometimes use the phrase, “We truly walked about Zion today!” This is the rapture they would sometimes experience: heaven moving a little closer to earth under a time of blessing, such as a personal or church revival. How we could use the fresh breath of Zion to dissolve the air pollution from the Prince of the Power of the Air! How is this for refreshment: “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:37, 38). You won’t find this water bottled and waiting in your nearby supermarket and you won’t pull this out of your faucet at home. This refreshment comes only from Jesus. We need more Jesus and Heaven in this world of ours.
-Pastor Pope-