(If you want to hear Lori read the story click)here

 

 

Last night I curled up with my precious and innocent twins to watch an episode of White Collar on the computer. It was cozy under the quilts, and we only had to censor a little bit of the actual show. But I am distraught about the images that showed up as side bars. The explicit photos were in our peripheral vision as we were hunting for the right episode, so I did not really notice them at first. But they are still haunting me the next morning.

 

I am trying to resist falling back on the rants that begin with "When I was young..." but I doubt those pictures would have made the cut in a commercial for the Andy Griffith show, which is what I was watching when I was nine. 

 

My girls have a limited diet of tv, so I am praying they do not become calloused to the anti marriage messages that saturate the media. But I wonder what the long term effects are for an entire generation. If they marry, which they pray for every night, the boys they will fall in love with are even now being bombarded with highly sexual content. That is unless they are Amish. Or blind. 

 

It is difficult to hold marital intimacy as sacred when you have been fed a continual stream of seeing it smeared.

 

Yesterday I finished reading the novel "The Help." It is an excruciating story about the endemic hatred of blacks that held Mississippi in a vice during the first half of the last century. The women who were courageous enough to bring incremental change through their story telling grab on to a tiger that threatens to kill them all. Skeeter, the writer who collects the stories of black maids working for white families, has herself grown up under the oppressive cloud of contempt for people of color. How does she manage to choose differently than her parents, her friends, her senator, her neighbors?

 

It is hard to hold another human being as precious when you have been fed a continual stream of seeing them dismissed. But in my brief lifetime there has been a shift. Not an eradication of racism, but a new direction. I too have a dream, of a day when marriage love is lifted out of the sleaze.