Wednesday, March 6, 2002
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Wednesday, March 6, 2002 |
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Authority fight: I'm at that age By BILLY MURPHEY I am at the age where I constantly look back at how my parents were during my youth, and if I am the same way now. Am I a complete replica of the way they were then? In some humorous ways the answer is yes, like when I yell at my kids, "Because I said so," or, "Don't forget to hang up your poncho every night." In most ways though, my generation and my parents' generation are completely different. My parents were strict. My parents spanked. They had the confidence and resolve to follow through in all they believed in and threatened us with. To this day, I still fear being arrested "narc-ed out" by my mom, even though I have never touched a drug in my life. My parents exuded authority, yet they also respected it and they always took the side of authority over ours. Somewhere in the generational change-of-guard this respect for authority has reversed. Maybe my generation lost faith in our world when, as youngsters, we witnessed grown adults wearing plaid bell-bottoms dancing to Abba music. Maybe we can blame Nixon, or the Vietnam War or the systematic assassinations of our most beloved leaders, but somewhere, somehow we have become this jaded age that trusts no one. Every situation I am in, where there is authority, I question it. Rarely do I trust my government to protect me. I don't trust my bank to care about my money more than they care about their own. I think the police are about machismo, I think the IRS is a dictatorship. "My people," as my generation will be one day known, seem to all feel this way. It seems anyone from the age 30-45 weaves tales of paranoid conspiracy concerning every man-made tenet from the "Reader's Digest Sweepstakes" to the outcome of "Survivor." And now that I think of it, our generation was maybe too young and impressionable to properly digest the true significance when we discovered that Bobby Ewing "dreamed" that whole season of "Dallas." Yet worse, what about the generation to come? Can they be more jaded than the jaded? The number one song in all the country last year, "Jaded," came from Aerosmith, passing the baton of distrust and indifference to a whole nation of youngsters eager to defy and decry authority. I would have hope for them if I just wasn't so ... jaded. Will they have any choice but to thus reject the even more important doctrines of our heritage, like the importance of owning a good barbecue grill or our God-given responsibility to water our lawns? Next thing you know they won't believe in professional wrestling We need to respect authority again, even just for the sake of the children. So "my people," what will we do? Should we start by filing the 1040EZ form and quit writing off the systematic dumping of our old clothes as contributions? Should we stop making faces at the police as they walk away from our car after ticketing us? Do we restore the age-old tradition of eating dinner at the dinner table and telling our kids to respect their teachers BEFORE we begin our nightly family quarrel? Mostly, our disrespect of authority is arrogance. None of us can believe than anyone else out there could do as good a job as we could. Everyone is inferior. But this is how we misunderstand authority. The good we gain from authority is not based upon that authority's perfection. It's based on our willingness to see ourselves as the part of a greater body. And when we do we'll simply feel better about ourselves. We will have a lot less stress, a few less places to lay blame and a whole lot more cookouts. [Visit Billy Murphy on the Internet at www.ebilly.net.]
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