by Mekelle Tenney
My daughter is five months old today! This will be her first Christmas. Yesterday I took her with me to do some Christmas shopping at the mall. As we walked in and out of the different shops and boutiques I was observing the atmosphere, the shoppers, and the new “norms”. I found myself reflecting on Christmas’s past when I was a girl. American’s were not so passive then, we recognized wrong as wrong and we were not afraid to label it as such. There was plenty amiss in the 90’s when I was a kid. But since that time what was amiss has only gotten worse.
In Christmas’s past the biggest problem facing marriage was divorce. Rates were high and broken families were becoming the new norm. This Christmas marriage has been “redefined”. The essential elements have been tampered with and the family is facing its biggest challenge yet. What was considered dangerous in the past is presently embraced. Of course the “new definition” of marriage is not all that is wrong in the world today.
There is so much evil that is accepted that I have to wonder how we got here. The nation has been made aware of the inhumane, vile, evil actions of Planned Parenthood. We know about the brutal death of millions of babies. When I was a child I never could have imagined that such practices could be legally protected. Yet it has only been a year since the videos began to be released and America has decided it is old news. We go about our daily lives, shrug our shoulders and say “that is the world we live in”.
This same callous attitude was reflected by the well-known Christmas character Ebenezer Scrooge when he stated “It’s not my business. It’s enough for a man to understand his own business and not to interfere with other peoples’.” And yet as I look at our past and the steps we took to get to our present situation I realize that this callous attitude was one of the biggest factors that got us here today. In a sense, we said “Ba Humbug” to marriage, family, and morality. Dickens’ Scrooge liked the darkness because it was cheap, America’s “Scrooge” liked the darkness because it was easy. American’s decided that it was easier to go with the flow than to take a stand and be labeled a bigot, a hater, or old fashioned. The twist in the American Christmas Carol is that the streets are filled with “Scrooges” shouting their “Ba Humbugs” to those who stand for traditional families, morality, and religion.
My daughter’s first Christmas takes place in a time when the world is confused. People don’t know how to stand up to the “Scrooges” who march through our streets demeaning and ridiculing what is good and right. I am worried about our future. In his visit from the ghost of Christmas past Scrooge asked why his old business partner carried chains. “I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
American’s continue to build our chain, link by link. Some of it is out of our control. But most of it is not. We must not give up. There is still more that we can do. We must fight a good fight. It is vital that we continue to participate in the debates and in the political process. Join the conversations on line, in your community, and in the class rooms. Be active in what is happening around you. As Scrooge so eloquently said, “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if preserved in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”