I was in a waiting room recently and the TV was showing thousands of rabid fans layered in thousands of dollars worth of NFL merchandise screaming their excitement to the sky over the start of the season. The zeal and devotion displayed is a testament to the strength of our commitment to an idea, but I cannot help grieving the loss of great opportunities. That passion and energy is an inheritance from our forefathers and it is being spent on our own entertainment? Not all Americans can build a car or perform surgery, but all people have the ability to seek and implement knowledge for the good of themselves and others. As a nation we must turn our passion towards directing our path and improving our community. I can imagine the collective power of the people if we watched our government as closely as we watched Hollywood. I can’t begin to imagine the advances we would make if we focused as much on building scholars and philanthropists as we do on building athletes and celebrities. I am in awe of the caliber of citizen we could produce if we focused more on parenting than we did on generating income for chrome wheels, Playstations, and iPhones. The United States of America has an exponential amount of potential and the key to harnessing this incredible power is using our passion and energy to advance our communities.
My father and mother shifted their entire lives around my brother and I. They did their best to continue pursuing their passions, but more often than not we were included in them or our own activities overshadowed them. My parents were not perfect but they understood that they were responsible for demonstrating and reinforcing a strong system of values. This system of values provided the foundation for who I became as an individual. With the rise of technology it has become too easy for parents to distract their kids with video games, television, and Facebook. This gives the parents more freedom to focus on their own interests, but it also allows someone else to imprint their ideals on the children and alter the foundation of their character. I love technology and I know I’m not alone in America. The ease with which we can explore the ideas of others and share our own is astounding. Technology provides us with amazing capabilities, but we must recognize the dangers inherent to them. When I was young I did not have cable television or Internet. Farther down the road when I had more access I bemoaned the lost opportunities of bygone days, but looking back I am thankful that my parents maintained such control over the information my young mind had access to. If I had been glued to the television I would not have been asked about my day or heard about my parents’ days while sitting at the dinner table. If I had had headphones on during car rides with my dad I would not have had as many opportunities to learn from him and his point of view. Parents must place themselves in the limelight and be the primary role model in the lives of their children. Children very literally are the future of America and parents must recognize the opportunity and responsibility that comes with having them.
Parents are not alone in underestimating and misplacing the value of young people. The entire community must be conscious of its effect on children, too. Our culture as a whole has become focused on individual achievement over furthering the common good. This is exemplified in our fascination with sports, movies, and music. When I was in school the cool kids were the athletes not the scholars. More often than not students dreamed of winning the World Series or an Emmy, they did not want to cure cancer and win a Nobel Prize. This is because most kids’ watched more television than I did and every day they saw the role models that the media placed before them. I did not grow up watching Deion Sanders and Michael Jordan set records and win games, I grew up seeing my mom run out the door to fight a fire. I grew up helping my dad pick up trash and shovel a random elderly lady’s driveway. We took pride in helping others and bettering our community. My school’s pride was in its sports programs. The whole community would turn out to support our football team, but debates and science fairs were sparsely attended. I am not trying to bash on sports. I still love participating in them and occasionally I enjoy watching them. However, our culture needs to get its priorities straight. We can celebrate success in sports, but we also need to celebrate success in academics. We need to cultivate a thirst and passion for knowledge. We must glorify advances in science as much as we glorify winning the Superbowl. We must show our young people the importance of bettering themselves through bettering their community.
Americans love to be entertained. We love listening to music, watching movies, and enjoying a cold beer while we discuss our fantasy football leagues. What many Americans fail to remember is that we are free to do so because our system of government was designed by men who were not free to do as they wished. We are free to do so because Americans have fought and died to gain and maintain that freedom. We must never forget the sacrifices that created and protected our ability to be seek entertainment, fame, and fortune. Out of respect for our forebears we must be active in our government and defend not only our rights, but the rights of those who will come after us. We need to be outraged when the media places more importance on celebrities than the possibility of sending men and women into harm’s way. We need to be more interested in what laws are being pushed through Congress than what movies are opening this weekend. There need to be more eyes on Washington D.C. than Hollywood, and we need to fill our Town Halls like we fill music and sports venues. We must not allow our love of entertainment to be the wool pulled over our eyes.
American citizens have more control over their destiny than any people in the world, but as Ben Parker said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Americans are passionate and consistently demonstrate their ability for intense enthusiasm, but unfortunately we utilize this predilection in the wrong places. As individual citizens and members of a national community we have a responsibility to contribute to the direction of our country in whatever way we can. By focusing on parenting and idealizing positive role models we can better prepare the next generation to fulfill their roles, and by respecting and fulfilling our heritage through government activism we can ensure that those roles will still be available to them.
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