Live Long & Prosper
S. M. Hutchens on the Fifth Commandment
When Mary and I were married more than twenty years ago, we decided that there would be no television in our home, mostly for the advantage of our children, whom we did not wish to be burdened with it. Several years ago we acquired a small set and keep it in the basement, connected to a videotape player, which gives us full control over what appears on the screen in our home. We still do not have television reception, either by air or over cable.
This means that when I do watch television, once or twice a year, what I see is more striking to me than to those who watch it regularly. I see the changes that have come gradually to most people as abrupt and rather shocking. One of the largest and most horrifying changes has been the portrayal of what is supposed to be normal family life, of the normal and expected behavior of parents and children. We have come a long way from “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Father Knows Best.”
The two things that have struck me most about what I have seen is the unspeakable arrogance and insubordination of television’s children, and the aimlessness, stupidity, and ineffectualness of television’s parents. Children are portrayed as wise about the real shape of the world, and as the people to whom their bewildered parents, caught in the tangle of outmoded ideas, must apply in order to understand how things really are. Parents who are “with it” ultimately do not resist the superior wisdom of their children, and end up confessing that really, they would be just like their own wild, free offspring if they didn’t have so many unreasonable inhibitions bred into them. If my own child said to me or her mother some of the things TV regards as cute, or did what it treats as normal teenage behavior, her life would be in danger (if her father survived his heart attack). If you allow your children to imitate this language and behavior, you are raising misfits and cultivating rebellion.
And this is only regular network television! In a hotel room several years ago, I was treated to what I think is called “rock video,” which looked like an attempt to make hell attractive. While I could only stomach a few minutes of it, the theme was clearly that violence is pleasurable, especially when it is carried out on the weak and helpless, and on authorities like teachers, judges, and ministers.
A Commandment of Honor & Love
All this is an attack on the most excellent and beautiful commandment of the Lord to
Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God commanded you, so that you may live long, and it may be well with you in the land which the Lord your God gives you (Deuteronomy 5:16).
The commandment should not be viewed as a promise that all children who treat their parents with respect will magically be given a long and happy life in this world, for sometimes very good children are not, and they are rewarded in the next. (Our Lord is the best example of this.)
What it is is a commandment that every child is to regard and treat his parents with the respect due something that is important, something weighty. Parents are not to be tossed off as insignificant, but one is to give them the attention that one gives tot those from whom one draws his very being, for the begetting and nurturing of the child carries on far beyond the marriage bed and the nursery. It goes on all the rest of life, where the father and mother continue the work of making the child, and eventually leave him in the hands of other fathers and mothers, ultimately in the hands of the heavenly Father, the true Father for whom all good parents raise their children, and their Mother, the Church of Christ Jesus.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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