Category Archives: Society

Society

A Philosophy of Profanity

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I heard a bizarre story on NPR yesterday about 15-year-old McKay Hatch who started the No Cussing Club. It has 30,000 members worldwide. Hatch has appeared on TV with Jay Leno and Dr. Phil, and the kid has a book coming out. All centered around the idea of not swearing.

I don’t get it.

Now it’s no secret that I’ve pushed the boundaries of acceptable language and paid for it. For quite a long time I’ve questioned what defines profanity and defended certain uses. In the end, I’ve concluded that cussing is a cultural issue. Swear words are culturally defined and vary between societies. What people considered profane a few hundred years ago is standard English today. What’s taken as normal conversation here could be incredibly offensive in another part of the world.

“It just makes me feel really offended and stuff,” Hatch says. “It just doesn’t make me feel good.”

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Adoption, Society

Choose Adoption

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I don’t like talking about abortion. Today’s the 36th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, and it’s hard to avoid those discussions today. I don’t like those discussions because it’s such divisive issue and I see both sides of it. I can’t stand the bitterness and anger and hatred that inevitably floods the conversation.

I’d rather focus on something we can all agree is good, like lowering the number of abortions. One way to make that happen is to encourage and support pregnant women as they choose adoption.

With that in mind I love this comment from Ruth Graham, daughter of Billy Graham, who helped her daughter navigate two unplanned pregnancies:

“No life is a mistake. God has plans for each life. And there are no illegitimate children—there are only illegitimate acts. And I believe that birth mothers are very courageous. They are living in a society that tells them they don’t have to carry to life. It’s legal in this country to have abortion, but they choose life. They lay down their lives; literally, their reputations, their figures, their school careers, sometimes their families kick them out. And the Lord said that there’s no greater love but that a man lay down his life for his friends, and these young women lay down their lives for their children. And I applaud them.”

The brave women who place their children for adoption instead of choosing abortion need to be celebrated.

History, Society

The Radical Words of Martin Luther King Jr.

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Martin Luther King Jr.Last week I talked a bit about Martin Luther King Jr. being a radical. Today it seems appropriate to look at some of his radical words.

On love vs. hate:

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

On nonviolence:

“Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.” (Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1964)

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Movies, Society

Reactions to the Movie Waitress: Abuse & Marriage

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I watched the movie Waitress this afternoon, primarily because it stars Nathan Fillion (I like him in just about whatever he’s in: Serenity/Firefly, Buffy, the short-lived Drive and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, among others). The movie was good, though it bothered me on two points. The basic story is a pie-making waitress gets pregnant, which ruins her plans to leave her abusive husband and prompts an affair. Despite that downer of a summary, it actually had funny moments (Andy Griffith’s character rocks).

Where are the Good Fictional Marriages?
First, is it possible to see positive marriage relationships portrayed in TV or movies? Maybe it was the trailers before the movie that featured multiple flicks about failing marriages, but this seems like a recurring theme. I realize life isn’t Leave it to Beaver and difficult, failing and failed relationships need to be portrayed; and I realize this isn’t a new theme; and I feel like a fundamentalist fuddy-duddy for complaining about it—but I just wish we could see more movies/TV shows about marital relationships that worked. I know they exist, I just feel like they’re endangered according to the entertainment world.

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God, Church & Stuff, Society

Rethinking Christmas

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Redefining Christmas has been on my mind this year. As I was editing a like-minded blog entry for Church Marketing Sucks, I realized how insane it is that people go into debt for Christmas. How crazy it is that we’re so obsessed with shopping that people get trampled. How sad it is that people feel the need to apologize when they can’t buy as many presents as they bought last year.

How ironic that the celebration of a baby born in shit and straw has become so materialistic. Mary and Joseph had very little in that stable. They didn’t have a fancy crib with a light up mobile. They didn’t have an iPod to soothe the crying baby. They didn’t have a credit card to reserve a better room. But they had more than they needed.

  • Wouldn’t it be cool if Christmas was a time when people got out of debt instead of into it?
  • Wouldn’t it change your city if instead of trampling people to get gifts, we lined up to serve one another?
  • Wouldn’t it be refreshing if instead of packing our own shelves and closets we gave gifts to people who really need them?

I’m rethinking Christmas. I hope you are too.

“The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor.” (Isaiah 61:1-2/Luke 4:18-19)

Society

You Can Change the World: $5 Raincoats & Shoes

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You can change the world this Christmas by buying raincoats for the homeless or shoes for the, um, shoeless. Two great, simple and cheap charity ideas:

50,000 Shoes in 50 Days
Anne Jackson teamed up with Soles4Souls to issue a challenge: Buy 50,000 pairs of shoes in 50 days. $5 will buy you two pairs of shoes. Soles4Souls gets shoes to people who need them, helping to keep them safe and healthy. There’s less than a week left in the challenge and more tan 40,000 pairs of shoes to go. There’s been some talk that this effort is more talk than action, that lots of people are talking about it but few are donating. That’s lame. I bought a pair of shoes (OK, two pairs). You can, too.

Dreaming of a Dry Christmas
I’ve talked about invisiblepeople.tv before, the site telling the stories of real homeless people. The man behind it, Mark Horvath, is working with homeless people in Los Angeles and has seen a need for raincoats. Michael Buckingham of Holy Cow Creative wants to send Mark 100 coats. He’s dreaming of a dry Christmas. $4.29 is all it takes to buy a raincoat for a homeless person. I bought one. It’s not much, but tell that to the homeless person getting soaked.

God, Church & Stuff, Society

The Wacky Jubilee

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Last Sunday the sermon at church covered a little known bit of Jewish law called the Sabbath Year and the Year of Jubilee. I had heard about the latter in 1999 with Jubilee 2000 and the Drop the Debt Campaign (this perhaps marked the beginning of Bono’s most public crusader years), and produced perhaps my favorite quote from Bono which nicely summarizes the concepts:

“I’m learning more and more about Jubilee—the biblical concept that every seven days there’s a Sabbath and every seven years the land is to lie fallow and every seven times seven, i.e. in the 50th year, a year of grace, your debts were forgiven, slaves set free, etc. Quite punk rock for God. In fact, there are a lot of squeakies involved in Jubilee (Christians are hard to tolerate, I don’t know how Jesus does it … I’m one of them).”

What an incredible concept. Leviticus 25 details all the rules (interesting that nobody ever quotes that bit of Leviticus) and Wikipedia gives a vague overview

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Society

You Can Change the World: Redefining Christmas

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For all intents and purposes Christmas has become a secular holiday. Sure, if you dig down deep the root idea behind all the gift giving, Christmas trees and Santa Clauses can be traced back to Jesus. But you have to do a lot of digging, and despite the continual reminders about the ‘reason for the season,’ Jesus really takes a backseat.

That’s why I like projects like Advent Conspiracy and Water for Christmas. The idea behind Advent Conspiracy is to remind people what Christmas is all about and encourage a radical redefinition and reinterpretation of the holiday. Water for Christmas is a challenge that as Americans we spend $450 billion on Christmas, yet it would only take $144 billion to ensure that everyone has access to clean water. (Shane Claiborne writes a little more passionately about these issues as related to Buy Nothing Day.)

As a family we’re trying to redefine what Christmas means for us. This year we’re instituting a new idea. Half the money we spend on one another is going to be donated to a cause. Part of the Christmas fun will be picking what cause (or causes) you’d like to donate your Christmas money to. It means we’ll get half the usual presents from each other and we’ll be able to donate more. It’s a small step, but I really like the idea.

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Business & Marketing, Society

You Can Change the World: Blank2Clothe.com

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I'm About to Yo-yo 2 ClotheLast week I yo-yoed and clothed a homeless teen.

Here’s how it works: Virgin Mobile set up Blank2Clothe.com where anyone can submit a video*. They approve the video and donate one article of clothing to one of the millions of homeless youth in America. That’s it.

But it gets better. Each time a video is watched five times, they’ll donate another article of clothing. So far 11 articles of clothing have been donated from my video and the site claims more than 100,000 donations so far.

So let’s care for some homeless youth:

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Art, Society

You Can Change the World: Paso a Paso

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Jenni White's painting of life in GuatemalaA friend of mine and his family spent six months in Guatemala finalizing the adoption of their second child. That experience inspired them both artistically and practically:

“It is a land of great beauty, but marred by devastating poverty and instability. Guatemala impacted us spiritually as well as aesthetically. We saw poverty and injustice unmasked. The reality of poverty—that some people cannot provide for their families no matter how hard they work—was overwhelming.”

In response, my friend’s wife Jenni created a series of 10 paintings depicting the life and people of Guatemala. They also got involved in Paso a Paso, a nonprofit organization that’s trying to build a sustainable community in a small neighborhood. They’re focusing on education, clean water, safe stoves and job training.

Most families in this community cook with open fires in their home, and as a result the World Health Organization reports that the leading cause of death for children under 5 in Guatemala is falling into these fires. That’s astounding. Paso a Paso is working to replace in-home cooking fires with enclosed wood-burning stoves made from insulated steel drums. You can buy a stove for $130.

In addition to donations, Paso a Paso also sells a few items made locally, including blankets, purses and stationary. Jenni just got back from a trip to Guatemala to work in the community and connect with the people.

Consider supporting Paso a Paso, purchasing some of their locally made products, or buying one of Jenni’s paintings (contact her through JenniWhite.com).