Category Archives: Media

Still Golden After All These Years

April 10, 2006

 Do unto others…unto others?  Is it a poem?  Shakespeare?

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

I shudder with a mixture of dread and curiosity every time Jay takes to the street with his camera crew and a microphone in hand.  In a regular feature Jaywalking, Leno approaches people on a Hollywood street to survey their knowledge on current news or a particular topic.

One night it’s history.  Leno asks passersby how many judges there are on the Supreme Court.  A young man laughs, shrugs his shoulders and tosses a number in the air.  Thirty six?  Leno laughs, too.  So, he asks, did you go to college?  Yeah, the man replies.  I graduated last year.

The Golden Rule?  It’s a mathematical formula, isn’t it?

In a variation on his regular theme, Leno one night lets people choose their questions from either a 4th, 6th, or 8th grade text.  Jen, a registered dental assistant, says the Grand Canyon is 3200 miles long, and an Alabama State student says Columbus discovered America in 1842.  What country did we fight in the Revolutionary War, Jay asks Selena.  Oh, my gosh.  I don’t know this stuff, she admits.  I really don’t know this stuff.  Keeping a straight face, Leno tells her, I believe you.

Another night, and another question…laughter gives way to sadness as we witness the current state of affairs in modern American life.  What is the Golden Rule, Jay asks.  One after another, each person stares at him with a blank face.  You know, he persists.  The Golden Rule…do unto others…?  That’s enough to get them started.

The Golden Rule?  Do unto others…before they do it to you.  Yeah, that’s it.

The ethic of reciprocity is a general moral principle found in virtually all religions, often as a fundamental rule. It is most commonly heard as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  This traditional rule is so highly valued that it has been known in English for centuries as the “Golden Rule”.

How did we manage in America to loose sight of the Golden Rule?  Why is it impossible for these regular people to immediately recite the simple statement for Jay?  How can we possibly teach our children new attitudes of respect and love when we have lost sight of a common cultural law as basic as the Golden Rule?

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. [Mat 7:12 NIV]  A nation that does not have this law written on its heart is a nation that has forgotten how to love.

As I would have them do unto me?  Would I have them yell at me and trash me with vulgarity and accusations on Jerry Springer’s show?  Certainly not.

Would I have a dear family member meet me center stage on a national television talk show to reveal a devastating “secret,” entertaining the world at the expense of my humiliation?  Of course, I wouldn’t.

What part of letting my friends get drunk on Spring Break is a measure of my love for them?  Not one bit of it.

Restoring a healthy expression of love to our nation is as simple as remembering one rule, golden in value:

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” [Mat 22:36-40 NIV]

As we take up the great commandment and make it the watchword for our life, it is exceedingly clear how much of modern life encourages us to focus on what is good for ourselves regardless of how it impacts others.

The Golden Rule is the narrow path.  It is the touchstone, the measuring stick, the weight and measure for all we say, do and think.  It is not merely a “good idea.”  It is the law.  It is a commandment.  It is the sight we must fix our eyes upon, the bandage for our spirit, and the balm for a hurting world.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

____________________

New International Version (NIV), Copyright (c) 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society.  Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

 _____________________________

 November 12, 2004 – Old as the Hills

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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.

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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

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The Science of Wisdom

February 27, 2006

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

It’s a strange memory, but a vivid memory.  Christmas afternoon 1964, my sister, 11, and I, 13, sat in the family room watching news.  Not because we wanted to watch the news.  But it was the only show my father would let us watch on our new Christmas color television set.  It was the only show in color.

Color television had been available since 1953.  The first commercial television program on color film was an episode of Dragnet, followed by such milestones as a live telecast of the Tournament of Roses parade the following month.  As with all firsts, history tracks the first color broadcast of a president (Dwight Eisenhower in June, 1955), the first color coverage of the World Series (Dodgers vs. Yankees in September, 1955), and the first colorcast cartoons (the Flintstones and the Jetsons in fall, 1962).

Yet, my family along with most other American families continued to watch television in black and white.  The first RCA color sets cost $995, the equivalent of over $6,500 today. In 1954, it was enough to buy a car, and nearly enough to buy a modest house.

By the mid-1950s, every company with the exception of RCA stopped manufacturing color televisions, and few produced color programming. Yet, losing some $65 million over a decade, RCA persisted in developing and marketing the technology.

 

The premier of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in September, 1961, was a turning point.  It was a magical experience to see the peacock’s tail unfold in red, orange, green and yellow.

 

Finally, in 1964, the tide turned, and RCA began to profit handsomely from its investment in color television.  It had taken 25 years for color television to go from its earliest prototypes to mass acceptance. According to Alex Magoun, director of the Sarnoff library holding RCA history, this is about the time every new technology takes to really catch on.

Today, a teenager is probably unable to conceive of a world where we would not be  able to watch live color coverage of downhill skiing at the Turin Olympic Games from 20 different camera angles.  In a child’s mind, television has always been here.  Like snowflakes, pine trees, and sledding, color television is and was and always has been.

In the short span of one human life, it is hard to maintain the long view.  Technology is easy to follow, with every detail recorded many times over in tech manuals and corporate profit and loss statements.

But televisions, computers, and air travel are not the only “new fangled” inventions of modern man.  Even our ways of thinking are marked by radical shifts that we have lost track of.

One mental shift has made an impact every bit as dramatic on modern life as color television.  It is hard to conceive of a university without a department of sociology, but in fact, no sociologists even existed to set sail and land on Plymouth Rock with the Pilgrims in 1620.

Sociology is actually a relatively new academic discipline which evolved in the early 19th century. It usually concerns itself with the social rules and processes that bind and separate people not only as individuals, but as members of associations, groups, and institutions.

Motivated by an interest in our behavior as social beings, sociologists began to quantify any number of human actions, allowing these academicians to perform their intricate analysis of short contacts between anonymous individuals on the street and to expand their theories to the broad study of global social processes.

A related trend in sociology, emerging since the late 1970s, attempted to make it a more “applied” discipline, applicable in areas such as non-profit organizations and nursing homes.  The results of sociological research have been used by educators, lawmakers, administrators, and others interested in resolving social problems and formulating public policy, through areas such as survey research, evaluation research, methodological assessment, and public sociology.

In other words, if we want to know what’s wrong…and if we want to know how to fix what’s wrong…ask a sociologist.

So, what was the world like before sociologists began to engineer and quantify human behavior?  How did humans seek solutions to human problems?  How did we organize life?

This is not idle speculation.  As a nation, we have nearly stopped thinking and acting unless we can open our briefcase and pull out a 3-inch file of social statistics and research to support our views.  Consider the following.

Solomon’s wisdom is often cited in a famous incident in which two women came before him with a baby, each claiming to the the mother.  Solomon ordered the child be cut in half, and by observing each woman’s reaction, determined the true mother.  Today, we have case workers, MSWs for sure, who interview the entire family and neighborhood, cite studies on mother love and bonding, and make their final report in triplicate.

Or in September, 2004, behavioral research on 1,792 adolescents proved that teenagers who watch a lot of television with sexual content are twice as likely to engage in intercourse than those who watch few such programs.  Katie Couric’s reaction was a brief, “Duh?”

King Solomon was a bit more expressive.  Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.  Put away perversity from your mouth; keep corrupt talk far from your lips.  Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you. (Prov 4:23-25 NIV)

For all of our numbers and studies and statistics and analysis, have we really advanced beyond the centuries-old wisdom that informed men’s hearts and guided their steps?  And is it just possible that social scientists have found ways to add and subtract research that would justify why a lemming should follow his brother over the cliff?

Sociology has not always existed.  Thankfully, great minds and human wisdom are not modern inventions.  They are, they were, they always have been.  Even before sociology.

October 29, 2004 – Food for the Brain

September 10, 2004 – Duh

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Small Acts of Courage

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

December 26, 2005

It was last package under the tree…DVDs…the full first year of the hit television series 24.  The store clerk warned me.  “Once you begin,” he said, “you won’t be able to get away from the television.”  He was right.

The past 12 hours have been heart-stopping.  Jack’s family has been kidnapped.  Janet was hit by a car, saved by hospital emergency workers and then murdered.  Torn by conflicting advice from every corner, Palmer, presidential candidate of supreme integrity, has to choose between sending his son to prison or saving an enemy from murder.

This show has it all.  Intrigue, love, deception, honor, betrayal, sabotage and chaos.  But above all, it has courage.  Jack fighting to find his family, Kim pleading with her kidnappers to rescue Janet, Rick digging a grave for his friend while plotting escape from captors, and Teri offering to be the rapist’s victim in place of her own daughter.

Action is intense.  Finally, worn out from danger and tension, we manage to turn off the television just as Jack runs after Teri and Kim into the woods, chased by men firing automatic weapons.  Will CTU helicopters arrive in time?

Modern drama, amplified by special effects, has given courage a new persona.  Back when courage was young, in the old black and white westerns of the 50s, it never had to outlast the last bullet in the six-shooter.

Today, courage must be teamed with the ability to speed down the freeway firing back at your pursuers while decrypting the ransom note on a palm pilot before satellite signals set on a 60-second timer fire an ICBM from Antarctica to obliterate the sold-out World Series crowd at Houston Astros Ballpark precisely at the moment the President of the United States throws out the first pitch.

But that’s movie courage.  Real courage is more simple.

The world may indeed explode with one single blast of an ICBM.  For a disaster of that magnitude, we need action heroes like Jack and their type of courage.

However, the world is ever more likely to dissolve in the poison accumulated over decades of human indifference to eternal truths that have been discarded in order to pursue our own momentary desires.  We can turn the tide on such a disaster.  But it will also take courage.

It takes courage to return to truth.  Like the mythical sirens who sang to sailors, modern culture lures us with promises that we can have everything we want without a price.  By far, the easiest path laid out for us today is the road of sexual permissiveness that has led to unwed teen pregnancies, an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, a breakdown in marriages and destruction of families.

Truths set aside, we have been persuaded that fidelity, honor, reverence, monogamy, and family no longer matter.  We must resist the easy path before us.  Only courage can help us restore the natural order of human life and dignity.

Declaring truth is an act of courage.  Sex for humans is more than the animal sex act that produces a litter of puppies.  In a world where promiscuity is excused as “natural” human conduct, we must have the courage to speak the truth.

Restoring truth in our homes is an act of courage.  Setting standards for our own behavior as adults, becoming role models for our children, may force us to give up our own bad habits first.  If we are to speak the truth, we must live it, too.

Upholding truth in our relationships is an act of courage.  Seeking counseling to restore a marriage is a gift to ourselves and to our children, a decision that will challenge us to be better people at the cost of our own personal accountability and sacrificial love.

Standing apart for truth is an act of courage.  Being the only parents who object to handing out free condoms at the local high school may set us up as targets for those who teach children that abstaining from sex is unrealistic and unnecessary.  We must be willing to stand for truth, even if we are standing alone.

The world is in danger.  The script for saving the world is already written in the eternal truths about human love.  But it’s not enough to know the truth.

We have the power to save the world…one simple courageous act at a time.  Real courage…in real life…is exercised in the simple decisions and actions each of us make during every ordinary day.

We may know the truth.  But, courage is required to live the truth.

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December 27, 2004 –  New Year’s Resolution:  Another Kind of Diet

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