Trips down memory lane can be terribly boring. After all, the times change. Well, the murdering of a 4-year old by a 14-year old is most haunting reminder of this truth. 30 or 40 years ago—perhaps even more recently than that, the very idea of a 14-year old murdering a little child was entirely unthinkable. And “murder” is the right word choice here, because the 14-year old drowned the 4-year old in the bathtub and then put the 4-year old in a the clothes dryer to conceal the dead child’s body.
This brings me to a set of morally beautiful reflections by Ben Stein, which he put forward this past summer on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary. Stein poignantly observes that we as a society keep wondering why today’s children are engaging in utterly appalling behavior while, at the very same, we do little if anything to reinforce the ideas of respect and decency.
The 14-year old about whom I began this essay had committed the wrong of sodomizing a 4-year old. It was when the 4-year old threatened to tell his own mom that the 14-year old decided that it was best to kill the child.
What is interesting here is how quickly and methodically the 14-year went about doing this. It is almost as if he had already had a plan in the event that things went wrong. And this is where Ben Stein’s observations are strikingly relevant.
The very idea that people are not influenced by that to which they are repeatedly exposed is just so much nonsense, as the former McDonald’s commercial “You deserve a break to day” makes so abundantly clear”. All sorts of people found themselves humming that tune. And then there was Wendy’s 1984 commercial with the elderly lady asking “Where’s the beef?” Asking “Where’s the beef?” became a part of common parlance for awhile. Clara Peller was the actor.
Needless to say, constant sex and violence on television most surely provides a subliminal moral blueprint for many a youth; and surely this is what happened with the 14-year old. He did not have to think about what to because he had most certainly received a flood of subliminal message regarding how to dispose of living people who are “in the way” or who might get us in trouble by “telling on us”.
Notice, too, that in the name of loving our children, we as a society have taught children be completely disrespectful of their elders. There was a time when any elderly person could have said to any teenager “Young lady/man don’t do that. Behave yourself”. And just about every teenager would have been respectful enough to comply at least while the elderly person was still present. Nowadays, of course, an elderly person who dared utter such a remark to teenager would almost certainly be verbally assaulted—if not physically threatened. Are we better off? Surely not!
Memory Lane is not a virtue in and of itself. Clearly, there is much about the past that we have rightly discarded. But we know for certain that something has gone terribly wrong in a society when the young teenagers of that society are committing crimes which, once upon a time, only hardened criminals committed.
Ben Stein asks: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren’t allowed to worship God as we understand Him? Whatever else is true, the idea of God reinforced the idea of reverence. And while no world of humans is perfect, an inescapable truth is that a world which takes reverence seriously will automatically be a better world than one which does not take reverence seriously. And if there is no God, the current trajectory would suggest that we are better off with the myth that there is one than with the reality that God does not exist and, therefore, anything goes.
The saying is that one reaps what one sows. Modernity is fashioning a crucible of out which a basic disregard for human life is becoming the main ingredient that overflows into the crevices of human action. An moral indifference that once upon a time took years of hardened experience to develop is now seamlessly fashioned by the moral vapidness of the things that we routinely valorize on a daily basis.
Let me conclude by putting the point as follows. Between doing that which is ignoble and doing that which is noble, the lesson that society is unmistakable teaching the young is none other than the view that it is the ignoble deed that wins the audience and the ratings and the contracts. To be sure, news reporters sometimes make mention of the noble deeds that this person and that person has done. But it is extremely rare that these noble deeds are the deeds that make for a tremendous publicity splash. No, it is the right sort of ignoble deed that does.
Against a relentless backdrop of valorizing ignoble behavior just about everywhere, is it really surprising that a 14-year old murdered a 4-year old by drowning the child? I think not.
The surprise, if that is the word for it, is that any of continue to be surprised.
