Glamourous Lies

We caught our 12 year old watching a music video on YouTube and yanked her access to the internet. YouTube is not taboo, and neither are music videos. However, when my husband walked into the room, all he saw were a gyrating, half naked couple obviously pursuing the more carnal side of their relationship. My daughter was offended and took this as a sign that we didn't "trust" her. It took time to make it clear to her that our issue wasn't one of "trust." The video wasn't particularly racy but it was misleading as to the nature of love (typical of love songs, right?). "Love" was being equated with sex, period. EVen then, it wasn't all about "our" definition of love versus the singers, but rather that at 12 our daughter was not prepared to separate the wheat from the chaf. Like all heavily produced music videos, this one was pushing buttons my daughter was not prepared to have pushed, much less knew she had to be pushed!

Halo 2 is a popular game in my house, especially the online arena-style version of play. The game has carefully crafted laws of physics so that objects fall down, grenades blasts send bodies flying in logical directions and jeeps and armored vehicles are too heavy to pick up, much less throw. Sometimes, however, you end up in a game where the host has altered the physics of the game. Jeeps become projectiles and players can jump over buildings or fall from great heights without injury.

The game's original makeup is intended to resemble real life, at least at a basic level. (Regenerating in a new, unhurt body 10 seconds after being shot is definitely a departure.) But the game play is predictable because the consequences of an action are pretty clear. You hit someone with a grenade and they are going to fly. In the same way, the stability of real life physics are fairly self-evident; if you walk off a building, you are going to fall. As physical action has consequences based on the stable, unvarying physics of the universe, so to do ideas. When someone truly believes an idea, they act upon that idea and those ideas have consequences. Thus, in simple terms, bad ideas lead to bad consequences; the greater the error in the idea, that is the more it deviates from what is true, the more dire the consequences: The idea of German national superiority lead to the death of over 5 million people.

So as a parent, one of your jobs is to teach your children to operate in terms of the ideas underlying reality: what is right, good, and true. Because what they believe, they will do. If they think it is okay to steal as long as you don't get caught (think Enron), then they will. If they think it's okay to lie about other people if it gets you ahead, they will. If they believe that it is their duty to care for those in need around them, then they will. And each of those actions have consequences both for them and those around them.

Thus, like entering a Halo2 arena where the physics had been altered, this video was presenting a view of reality where ideas might lead to actions, but the consequences of those actions are subject to the writer or marketers personal preference. In this way, movies, television, books, magazines, whatever you care to name, frequently present a distorted reality. They dress up beautiful people and show them living lives of varying degrees of depravity (in the worst cases), but then the consequences are ignored.

And so the challenge as a parent is to give my children, not just the girls but boys as well, a firm foundation on which to view the world, to prepare them to expect the consequences of their actions, and most importantly, to recognized a dressed-up, glamourous lie when they see one.