What We Tolerate Today …..

…. we embrace tomorrow.

So goes the old adage attributed to many and existing in many forms.

I was somewhat shocked yesterday to see a story about HBO’s series “Angry Boys” and in particular, an image of a very young girl drinking out of a cup shaped like an oversized, pink, anatomically-detailed male penis.

If you want to see the picture that I am referring to, please click here (if they haven’t taken it down already). *WARNING: graphic imagery*

Meanwhile, Michelle Williams, Chief of Staff of the New Black Panther movement had this to say on the radio on Tuesday:

"Let me tell you, the things that's about to happen, to these honkeys, these crackers, these pigs, these pink people, these ---- people. It has been long overdue. My prize right now this evening ... is gonna be the bounty, the arrest, dead or alive, for George Zimmerman. You feel me?"

Freedom of speech and expression, we say!  It’s not promotion of hate – it’s expression of passion!  She later apologized and claimed she wasn’t inciting anything.

Yeah … right.  Words of passion, that, when the words are changed and directed back towards African Americans, are words of racism are still words of hatred.  Period.

Meanwhile, there are video games being played by pre-teens where one of the objectives is to pick up hookers, kill them and take one’s money back.  There are even unofficial contents held where young people come up with the most creative scenarios in this regard.

“How much impact can such things have on the developing mind?”, ask many of the freedom-of-expression enthusiasts.

Then I think about the book “The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct” which was available on Amazon in 2010 and which Amazon vigorously defended under their “freedom from censorship” policy before eventually removing it under public pressure. 

I remember debating the nature of this book with a lot of freedom-of-speech folks who thought that there was nothing wrong with it until I gave them this scenario and asked for their opinion.

The book has just been sent home with your child as the school’s book-of-the-month and will be studied after-hours at school in small-group sessions for the next four weeks.  Homework will be done during the after-hours session.  Now what do you think of the book?

Suddenly, when realizing the potential impact within their own world, they understood the concern.

Now, in fairness, many things that are the norm today once started out as controversial subjects.  Three that come to mind immediately are the emancipation of slaves  in the USA, revocation of child labour abuse and equal rights for women.

However, people like to hide behind important successes like these in our culture when justifying and rationalizing the other things I just described.

They chant the mantra “take the good with the bad” in order to make society better overall.

But that simply doesn’t hold water with me.

Surely we know the difference between what needs to be improved in society and that which drags society down.

For the people that don’t know or can’t see the difference , maybe I’ll arrange for their child’s school to source out a copy of the pedophile book and have it sent home with their children.

Maybe then they will see that there is a not-so-fine-line between change that improves humanity and change that tears it down.

Maybe then they will have better insight into what should be tolerated and what should not be.

Maybe.

In service and servanthood,

Harry