Matthew 7:12 – Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
When I was a youngster, one of the first things the teacher “taught” us at the beginning of each school year was The Golden Rule. In order to make it easy for the younger kids to remember, the teacher usually paraphrased it something along the lines of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” And remember it we did. But nowadays kids aren’t being taught the message that Christ was teaching in the famous passage of Mathew 7:12, and for all too many of them it shows in their attitudes towards their peers, family members and authority figures.
In this modern age of “tolerance”, kids are being taught to accept as normal all varieties of abnormal behavior, but somehow they are missing the important lesson that they need to respect others because we were all made in God’s image. Instead of learning that each and every human being has an intrinsic value inherited from our common Creator, they are being taught that our society’s basis of respect should be “tolerance” for those who are different from them. It makes no difference to the educational establishment what those differences are or how much they deviate from traditional and moral norms, they are still to be respected at face value because anything less would be “discrimination”.
As a result, many of our kids are now growing up with a strong sense of entitlement (i.e. selfishness) instead of the once-universal belief that everyone deserves the same fighting chance at achieving happines and success in life. Anything goes as long as the end result is getting what WE want and living the type of lifestyle WE want to live, regardless of how much those things deviate from our nation’s Christian heritage.
I believe that’s why we see so many kids getting into trouble on a scale that was simply unimaginable even 25 years ago, and until our schools go back to teaching the fundamentals that I and those who came before me grew up with (starting with The Golden Rule), things are only going to keep getting worse.
Amen!!!