Virtue, Blue Light, and the Needy

I was listening to two fathers talk about their children's sports activities; not only were they involved in year-round local sports, but they were also on travel teams.

It was as if they were talking about robots programmed to play baseball and hockey - they were pushed into the sports pipeline and their sports futures are assured until high school graduation, if not beyond.

Why don't we also talk about how we are developing virtue and character in our children? Certainly that is more important. Or is it?

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A coworker just left my office - thankful I think to leave. I was talking to him about a recent ABC 20/20 segment that highlighted addiction to electronic devices in children and adolescents. He came in with a story about his young son using his tablet in bed, and he left with me asking him to think about the child's well-being. I don't get a lot of traffic in my office...I wonder why.

The 20/20 segment shouldn't be a surprise, the fact that it is and that most parents are in denial shouldn't be a surprise either - how can people living in a stupor be surprised? We disparage parents of crack babies but think little of raising children on blue light and electronic addiction - no matter what it does to their brains and cognitive processes.

So the adults program the computers and the computers program the children and then the adolescents program more devices and the devices program the population and it may well be that one day there really is a Matrix - which I think is already the case - the Bible calls it "this present age" or "kosmos" - God's people are in the Matrix but not of the Matrix - well, I hope so anyway...hard to tell sometimes.


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King Lemuel's momma said to him (Proverbs 31:8 - 9):

"Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all the unfortunate. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and defend the rights of the poor and needy."

Well, I don't see many leaders speaking up for the poor; not in the professing church and not in government. The way a society treats it defenseless, its innocent, its children, its elderly, and its poor says a lot about the society.

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it and decrease the surplus population."