| Erroneous virtues are running out of
control in our culture. I don't know how many times my 13-year-old son has told
me about classmates who received ＄10 for each "A" grade on their report
cards—hinting that I should do the same for him should he ever receive an A.
Whenever he approaches me on this subject, I give him the same reply: forget it!
This is not to say that I would never praise my son for doing well in school.
But my praise is not meant to reward or elicit future achievements, but rather
to express my genuine delight in the satisfaction he feels at having done his
best. Doling out ＄10 sends out the message that the feeling alone isn't good
enough. As a society, we seem to be on the brink of losing our internal control—the ethical boundaries that guide our actions and feelings. Instead, these ethical standards have been eclipsed by external "stuff" as a measure of our worth. We pass this obscene message on to our children. We offer them money for learning how to convert fractions to decimals. Refreshments are given as a reward for reading. In fact, in one national reading program, a party awaits the entire class if each child reads a certain number of books within a four-month period. We call these things incentives, telling ourselves that if we can just reel them in and get them hooked, then the internal rewards will follow. I recently saw a television program where unmarried, teenage mothers were featured as the participants in a program that offers a ＄10 a week "incentive" if these young women don't get pregnant again. Isn't the daily plight of being a single, teenaged mother enough to discourage them from becoming pregnant again? No, it isn't, because we as a society won't allow it to be. Nothing is permitted to succeed or fail on its own merits anymore. A staple diet of candy bars makes an ordinary apple or orange seem sour. Similarly, an endless parade of incentives corrodes our ability to feel a genuine sense of inner peace (or inner conflict). The simple virtues of honesty, kindness and integrity suffer from an image problem and are in desperate need of better publicity. One way to do this is by example. I fear that in our so-called upwardly mobile world we are on a downward spiral towards becoming morally bankrupt. We may soon render ourselves worthless inside, while desperately clinging to a shell of appearances. |