Salacious!

I'm limb-hopping today. I received a piece of news yesterday that makes my stomach feel as if it had been plowed and disked.

There is a high school in the town where I live, which is having a dance recital tonight and last night. Sounds fun, doesn't it?

Well I have friends going to that school, who have luckily gotten the guts to spill what kind of program they have in store for their unsuspecting parents. I say that because there hasn't been an outcry and I can only surmise it is because their parents either don't know what kind of trash their girls are getting into, or don't care.

One of the girls went home from school and told her mother (C.) that she'd just heard the song to which one of the other teams was performing. C. immediately searched around until she found that song on the Internet. The words were extremely explicitly sexual. This song would have gotten an X rating for a movie in past years. Yes. THAT EXPLICIT. She read them to me and I wanted to barf in my mouth.

So C. called the school to talk to the instructor. He said the lyrics were open to interpretation. She talked to the assistant principal in charge of activities. That person was clueless but not overly excited about it. Apparently they did yank the lyrics. I'm not sure if they kept the music for that one number.

C. was thinking at that point that things were taken care of. Far from it. The costumes for at least one other number consisted of negligees and the girls did a Flashdance type of number with a chair and lots of grinding. For another number there were "booty pops" which said, "Come on in, guys. I'm easy."

I can only guess what gems they have in store for tonight.

The point is this, folks. What kind of garbage are they pumping into our children if they allow this sort of salacious porn to infect their programs WITH THEIR TACIT PERMISSION? How can they run a school if, at the very least, they have no idea what the instructors are teaching the kids?

These fourteen-year-old freshman girls might as well go on field trips to the local topless bar--maybe get some dance tips from the girl wrapped around the pole. Maybe while they're at it they could take a little side trip to the roadside to talk to a few hookers. One wonders what the term paper for such a class might be (except that they don't write term papers anymore).

I understand that some of the girls want to get a good grade in class. So they don't speak up when they feel uncomfortable. That's sad! And what is detestable is that those girls who don't feel uncomfortable about flinging their sexuality out there on the stage for anybody to leer at, are being encouraged by the very people who should be teaching them to respect themselves and to get an education so that they DON'T have to resort to dancing topless to survive.

What are they teaching our young men? How many perverts are going to be there tonight for a free peep show? Why force sexual predators to register anymore, when they offer this sort of smut for free or nearly free?

This is not about our second amendment rights. This about destroying the very fabric of society from the ground up. This is teaching our young women that the only thing they have to offer in life is a willing aperture.

WAKE UP!

Train your daughters to know that they are valuable as children of God! Train them to know that they have brains and courage and the ability to smash atoms and discover the cure for cancer. And if they really want to dance, choose something beautiful! Choose something that lifts the spirits and makes you free and alive and joyous!

I'm not just ranting from afar, here. I was on toe in ballet and danced the Red Queen in Alice and Wonderland and other roles. I did so much ballroom and folk dancing in college that I never had to take a P.E. class. I went on tour to Europe with my folk dance team. Never once did I have to dance like a hooker to get people to watch. I never had a costume I couldn't show my grandfather.

What are these people teaching? They should be gone. There should be so much outcry over this "regrettable oversight" that they never get a job like this again. Clearly they don't have the children's best interests at heart.

Part of this is our responsibility is as writers (lyric or otherwise). Some songwriter evidently felt that lyrics (I don't want to have that song on my blog so I'm not going to put the title here. Ask me if you have to know the title) such as these sell. And maybe they do. But so does crack. So does pot. If you write such lyrics to sell, you might as well be an audible porn dealer, as damaging as crack, though not patently against the law.

We writers have a responsibility to write content that makes the world a better place. We're on one side of a war and the other side is heavily outweighing our side (at least on earth). If we write garbage songs, or books or screenplays containing ambiguous, gray scale heroes, what do kids have to pin their respect on?

I'm not saying the heroes shouldn't be flawed. But we should be able to see the flaws are flaws, not behaviors to flaunt. We should know who the good guys are and that they stand FIRM in their convictions. Basically we need to write the TRUTH. Even in a fiction book, there can be basic truths from which a writer shouldn't stray. Orson Scott Card talked about the necessity writing a 'true' fiction story--being true to the character and plot or people don't stay with the story. It means not contriving and forcing characters into false situations that don't ring true.

I think that's one reason movie and TV show makers have had to amp up the violence, special effects, and sexuality. Their stories can't stand alone and people are often being trained from early on to think the effects ARE the story. Many kids nowadays aren't able to dig a plot out of a movie to save their lives. I think they're being engineered that way on purpose, just as girls are being engineered to be sex objects.



Integrity!