Crossed Out

Over the past ten years in New York City, I have personally witnessed the near extinction of trade schools. It is no longer profitable for adolescents to aspire to become an electrician, plumber, automotive technician, cosmetologist, cook, etc. The whole push is toward college, college, college. And who is to be incriminated for this heinous and outright totalitarian assault on our youth? The blame is not endemic to our educational system whose doctrines are as Draconian and tangled as a ball of yarn, but the wave of nauseating politicians, big business owners, billionaires, and social media that have invaded our public schools and depreciated the core values of education and replaced them with more lofty goals centered around money, fame, and entertainment. Our students have been systematically brainwashed by an influx of scrupulously-crafted rhetoric and a fussy agenda by individuals who have never been in a classroom much less taught and therefore have no business sticking their noses into our schools. Politicians in particular should not even be allowed to voice their opinions on our educational system; everything they touch turns to lead. Millions of dollars exchange hands, shady contracts are given to contractors with questionable reputations, favors are distributed like candy from a piñata as the warped decrees of these individuals reach our schools, transforming educational systems into big businesses. When the infernal smoke from these fire-breathing dragons clears, our kids are stripped of moral and ethical values and injected with an insatiable hunger for material goods that are as corrosive and addictive as a drug. I want to be a rapper. I want to be a singer. I want to be a professional basketball player. I want to be a professional football player. I want to make lots of money and buy a big house and drive fancy cars. Sound familiar? This is all I hear in the classroom day in and day out, and it has gotten progressively worse over the years. The dilemma extends beyond that of seemingly unattainable goals with senseless slogans such as “You can do anything you put your mind to” and “If you can dream it you can achieve it.” The main problem as I see it is that we have passed on to our youth the same mind-altering nonsense that was fed to us, which is that of elevating materialistic goods above everything else, specifically Christ. Idolatry is not confined to kneeling before a porcelain statue or doll, casting golden calves, carving wooden images of animals and humanoid entities, or erecting Asherah poles as the Israelites did in the Old Testament. I was once victim of such narrow-mindedness, thinking and walking aimlessly with an openly defiant and arrogant crowd who thought that by not following some Totemic religion or praying to statues we were following God’s First Commandment. It took me over thirty-something years on this earth to realize how skewed my way of thinking was and how Satan has skillfully lulled the world into a deep slumber to the point in which the majority are asleep while awake. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. And… We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one. And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. My little children, guard yourselves from idols. Musical entertainers, professional athletes, actors, high definition televisions, cars, big houses, money, cellular phones, power, prestige, self-aggrandizement, pride, these things have replaced God within the hearts of men. From the moment they learn to crawl and walk, we bombard our kids with thousands upon thousands of hours of mind-numbing television programs that gradually mold half of their [spiritual] identities, the other half comes by way of physical reinforcement once the child is old enough to place material value on the item or mentally able to internalize most of what they see on television. Thus from an early age, our view of Christianity is severely distorted by the outside world. By the time they reach adolescence, Christianity is not in their every day vocabulary; it exists as nothing more than some dogmatic term that is spoken of with a bit of contempt [out of ignorance that is partly due to lack of parental guidance] and seen as something taboo. It is reserved exclusively for Sunday worship; the remaining six days are a free-for-all. The end result is a complete absence of Christian morals and ethics from the life of a child. And we wonder why our youth is so lost, complaining about gang violence, drugs, sex, lewd parties, and just about every other facet of what has come to be accepted as “normal teenage behavior.” Kids mimic and parrot everything we do and say. By not maintaining a fixed set of Christian values such as a daily reading of the Scriptures or sitting together as a family to have dinner or watch a movie, we are setting the seeds for a dysfunctional home.