Category Archives: Love

How’s It Working for You?

April 3, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

America, how’s it working for you?

Who wants to know?  Dr. Phil.  That’s who.

Over twenty shows a month, twelve months a year, three and a half years…you can purchase transcripts of over 840 Dr. Phil shows where America gets psychoanalyzed, diagnosed, challenged, prodded, pushed, and changed.

Nasty Custody Battles

“I’m a Slave to My Spouse”

Infidelity Aftermath

Family Chaos

Love, Lies and the Law

Cheaters…and more…

MUCH more!  Each night on public television Americans reveal troubled relationships, enduring exposure of laundry lists of personal secrets, faults, and blemishes.  Why?

Because, after the show wraps up, and everyone goes home, we all cherish the hope that we will find what the human heart hungers for.  Enduring, honoring, forgiving love.

There is a tragic irony in all of this.  We have just traveled through a forty-year time warp of promises sold to us by feminists, humanists, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers, and sexologists…all of these “professionals” cultivated and nurtured by the “higher learning” institutions of our country.  If we just listen to them, liberate ourselves from the bondage of biological and cultural traps, and enter into a new age of self-fulfillment…we will be…well…fulfilled.

Then why are so many of us showing up on Dr. Phil?  America, how’s it working for you?

All this social re-engineering?  Replacing husbands and wives, fathers married to mothers, replacing all of these with cohabitors?  Sexualizing every human transaction?  Fulfilling every fantasy, dragging each bizarre behavior onto a new “reality show”?  Are we having fun yet?

Watching Dr. Phil for even one week, it is clear that the cultural reconstructionists of the past four decades have more work ahead of them.  Because in spite of their best efforts to convince us that we can restructure life to exclude marriage and embrace diversity of every imaginable…and unimaginable…combination…Americans are having a hard time of it.  How’s it working for us?

Single parent homes are on the financial edge.  Children go to bed at night without a hug from their father.  And sex offered to the latest “object of my affection” results in babies, abortions, and STDs that cause Mr. Right to vanish in a puff of smoke faster than magician Lance Burton can snap his fingers.

We don’t need to have “higher education” gurus to research us.  We don’t need reassurances that re-engineering the culture will work if we just give it more time.  We don’t need feminists to fix men, sociologists to fix families, or humanists to convince us we are happy in spite of what ails us.

How’s it working for us, America?  We are searching for love.  And we are ending up on Dr. Phil’s psycho-drama.

_____________________________

 November 7, 2005 – Public Policy Never Mended a Broken Heart

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Reclaiming Love

March 27, 2006

Multiple Personality:  A dissociative disorder in which two or more distinct personalities   exist in the same person, each of which prevails at a particular time. Also called split personality

 

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

In 1974, walking down the mall at Arizona State University could be a highly unpleasant experience for young women.  The mall was the central thoroughfare for all college traffic.  It featured an intersection at the Memorial Union and Library, where four paths led off to the colleges for business, education, science and liberal arts.

Around the library, a two-foot high block wall served as a mid-day “home” to a group of fraternity men, a perfect perch from which they could survey women walking by.  These frat jocks, elevating the sport of girl-watching to a new level, had created a set of large score cards with bold black numbers 1 through 10.

Their system was meant for entertainment, not for human compassion.  For the “lucky” women walking by, winks, laughs, calls and whistles would “reward” her with a row of perfect 10s.  But, with the same compassion of Simon Cowell, these winks, laughs and calls from the frat men could just as easily produce score cards of seven, six, five…or zero.

Thankfully, this crass frat game died out in the summer heat, never to reappear.  This was the Age of Aquarius when peace and love were painted on torn jeans.  Women were busy exercising their new-found liberation, and in this new world, there was no place for a game that trivialized women.

Alas, in the short span of forty years, these same men and women of my college years are now parents to a new college generation weaned on the lyrics of such rappers as Snoop Dog, Ice-T, and Eminem.  Tepid cards with numbers have been replaced by crude lyrics that describe women and sex in violent and abusive slang.

How did we get here from there?  In 1974, college women were insulted by a rating system that traded respect for a few cheap laughs.  In 2004, college women seek hoots and whistles by pulling off wet t-shirts in public bars.  How did the sixties in America fail to produce the fruit of peace and love?

On television, Lucy and Rickie have been replaced by Sex and the City, which unlike the frat scorecards, did not fade away into summer reruns.  In its sixth season, Sex and the City churned out episode 76, “Great Sexpectations” where Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte continued to tryout and discard men like last-year’s shoes.  If one day they ever do find “true love,” they will probably end up cast as characters on Desperate Housewives.

Abstinence educators daily witness the impact of this cultural shift.  As they work to reconnect our children with the truth of what love means, their greatest handicap is the American dissociative order which allows us to believe that the two distinct personalities of love and hate can peacefully co-exist in the same heart.  America suffers from multiple cultural personalities.

In one world, we work to teach adolescents the connection between love and sex.  Classroom lessons help students analyze situations between girls and guys, distinguishing between abusive and controlling behaviors and selfless, caring relationships.

In the other world, like switching the channels with the remote, we infuse our children’s hearts with entertainment based on abuse, control, violence and disrespect.  In the darkest moments, we write comedies where kids laugh at crude and destructive behavior as easily as we once did over Gilligan’s Island.

We have lost the understanding that a house divided cannot stand.  Integrity is now passé.  We chafe at morality, rejecting the idea that good must be good all the time in order to be good.  Instead, our life is a tortured contradiction where good can be bartered for whatever suits us at the moment.

If we want to restore the future happiness of our children, we must restore our culture.  We must reclaim our integrity.  We must pull together our cultural personality into one house, undivided, that stands for peace and love at all times and under all conditions.

To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice, Confucius said.

And as an author on divine unity, he teaches a singular method for coming together into one undivided national personality.  To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

_____________________________

October 29, 2004 – Food for the Brain

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A Failure to Love – Part 2

March 20, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

For over forty years, the murder of Catherine Genovese under the windows of her Queens, New York, neighbors has stood as a defining example of the tragedy of human indifference.  Her attacker had over twenty minutes to assault and stab “Kitty.”  When police were finally summoned, they determined that over 38 people had heard the attack, ignoring her cries and pleas for help…and had done nothing.

Indifference, the failure to be moved by the needs of a fellow human being, in this case, had immediate and devastating consequences.  We are able to see the result of indifference in the haunting photo of Kitty and point our fingers at 38 people.

But today in America, we are facing a crisis of indifference that is just as tragic.  Entrusted as guardians of the welfare of our children, we have let a culture of indifference develop, turning a corporate blind eye to assaults on our children on a daily basis.

Consider this brief sampling of events over the past decade:

  • In 1997, the Supreme Court ruled against the Communications Decency Act, removing the legal tool needed to prosecute those knowingly sending sexually explicit materials to minors.
  • A Kaiser Family Foundation report states that 70% of teenagers (ages 15-17) “have accidentally come across pornography on the Web.” Adolescent males make up one of the largest consumer groups of pornography, and their access on the Internet is largely unrestricted.
  • In a college sex survey this year, 87% of university students polled have virtual sex mainly using Instant Messenger, webcam, and telephone.
  • The average age of first exposure to Internet porn is 11.
  • Approximately 20% of all Internet pornography involves children.  According to a National Children’s Homes report, the number of Internet child pornography images has increased 1500% since 1988.

These events signal a change in our culture that cries out for our attention.  In the name of love for our children, we cannot be indifferent.

Replicated studies on pornography are virtually unanimous in their conclusions: When male subjects were exposed to as little as six weeks’ worth of standard hard-core pornography, they:

  • developed an increased sexual callousness toward women;
  • began to trivialize rape as a criminal offense or no longer considered it a crime at all;
  • developed distorted perceptions about sexuality;
  • developed an appetite for more deviant, bizarre, or violent types of pornography (normal sex no longer seemed to do the job);
  • devalued the importance of monogamy and lacked confidence in marriage as either a viable or lasting institution; and
  • viewed nonmonogamous relationships as normal and natural behavior.

Thankfully, the FCC has begin to tackle the problem of nudity and sex on television.  Weeding through roughly 300,000 complaints, it recently proposed almost $4 million worth of fines for television programming deemed indecent by the commission.  Of this total, $3.6 million in proposed fines were for the Dec. 31, 2004, episode of CBS’s “Without a Trace” which depicted teen girls and boys participating in an orgy.

Parents must do their part, too.  A Kaiser Family Foundation report released in March, 2005, reported that “about half (53%) of all 8- to 18-year-olds say their families have no rules about TV watching.  Forty-six percent (46%) say their families do have some rules, including 20% who say the rules are enforced most of the time, while the rest say the rules are enforced either some of the time, a little of the time, or never.”

Indifference is killing our children.  The graphic sexual imagery assaulting our children at every turn is not harmless. It is poisoning their view of normal human relationships, teaching them that sex is a commodity even in the most casual of encounters.

Love for our children demands more than words and hugs.  If we want our children to grow and mature with healthy attitudes about love, sex and marriage, we must fight the tendency to ignore what is right in front of our eyes.  We must get involved.

If we love our children, we cannot be indifferent.

 _____________

For more information visit:  www.protectkids.com

 See Archives for more past editorials.

A Failure to Love – Part 1

March 13, 2006

Hot…cold.

High…low.

Slow…fast.

Love…_______

How would you fill in the blank?  What comes to mind when you picture the opposite of love?

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

If you chose “hate” as the opposite of love, you have Merriam-Webster on your side.  Their exhaustive list of antonyms is a litany of hate:  abomination, hatred, loathing, rancor, allergy, animosity, antipathy, aversion, disfavor, dislike, abhorrence, disgust, repugnance, repulsion, revulsion, misanthropy.

Yet, as much as I respect Merriam-Webster as an authority on language, there is a word missing from their list.

______________________

In 1964, 38 residents of a Queens, N.Y., failed a test of love.  In the following days, weeks, and months, as their story was repeated in the news, no one could find any example of hate, dislike or revulsion in the hearts of these people.  Yet, as the ultimate example of man’s failure to love, this story has lived on for over forty years.

On another March 13th, in the middle of a quiet night, “along a serene, tree-lined street in the Kew Gardens section of Queens, New York City, Catherine Genovese began the last walk of her life.”  Twenty feet from her apartment door, “she took notice of a figure in the darkness walking quickly toward her.”

Court testimony at the trial held three months later confirmed the news stories that had shocked a nation.  One neighbor, Miss Picq, said that she saw Catherine Genovese lying in the street. “The poor girl got up slowly, walking to the parking lot,” she said tearfully.  “I heard two last screams for help, but couldn’t see her then.”

Another neighbor, Robert Mozer testified that he had yelled at the assailant. “I hollered, ‘Hey get out of there! What are you doing?’ He jumped up and ran like a scared rabbit, took off real quick,” Mr. Mozer told the court.  But the attacker returned.

In all, 38 neighbors of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese let her brutal murder occur without as much as picking up the telephone to call the police.  Over thirty minutes passed.  Kitty was stabbed 17 times under the windows of her neighbors.

“We thought it was a lover’s quarrel!” said one tenant. “Frankly, we were afraid,” said another witness. One woman who didn’t want her name used said, “I didn’t want my husband to get involved.” Others had different explanations for their conduct. “We went to the window to see what was happening, but the light from our bedroom made it difficult to see the street.” There were lots of excuses. Maybe the most apathetic was the person who told reporters, “I was tired.”

Kitty’s murder has become a textbook case for sociologists, psychologists and criminologists.  They have their theories.  They have their explanations.  Dr. Iago Galdston, a New York City psychiatrist said “I would assign this to the effect of the megalopolis in which we live which makes closeness very difficult and leads to the alienation of the individual to the group.”

You could say that.  It’s just that Dr. Galdston, with all of his fancy words, misses the key explanation.

The indifference of these people was just as effective as the rage of the attacker in bringing about the death of Kitty Genovese.  They failed to love.

Love is known by its action, not its feeling.  Indifference, “marked by a lack of concern for something,” is the ultimate choice to let harm happen because we are not moved to love another human being as ourselves.

Love that leaves us unmoved by the need of another human being is more than the absence of love.  Indifference is the opposite of love.

______________________

Jesus said love one another. He didn’t say love the whole world.
Mother Teresa

October 15, 2004 –  Where’s Poppa?

October 22, 2004 – Bringing Poppa Home

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