Living in a Cage

 Myrna Loy was a movie and television actress. Her long career spans 50 years.

In front of Venice High School, in Venice, California, there was a concrete statue of Myrna Loy. The original statue stood tall and beautiful, hair and dress flowing, her face and arm reaching up to the heavens.

That was in the past. In more modern times, the statue fell to the long abuses of vandalism. Loy's arms were broken, then repaired, folded in on themselves to prevent further vandalism. An iron fence was erected around the statue to help protect it.

None of which helped. In our modern society based on the selfish, "if it feels good, do it" generation, the statue continued to be vandalized until it had to be enclosed in a tighter fenced cage, completely covering the statue.

Instead of reaching up to the sky with grace and beauty, Loy's statue looked more like a prisoner, huddling in on itself, afraid to reach out for fear of getting her limbs hacked off again.

This is a metaphor for how we ourselves are trapped in a society which ideals have been vandalized and dashed to pieces in order to usher in a brave new world of atheistic nihilism. With every new attack, we as a society build higher fences, stronger bars, and enclosing cages in the vain attempt to secure ourselves from evil.

Notice how evil still persists, yet those who desire protection are the ones trapped inside cages.

Evil exists, yet the postmodern, deconstructionist culture will not, or can not accept the fact. Criminals aren't treated as criminals, but as victims, or worse, as celebrities. Compassion and feeling overwhelm modern sentiments directing the vain attempt to blame criminal behavior on a lack of money, or on poor education. We're told never to blame actions, because those are only expressions of not enough government funding, of Western imperialism, or of genetic programming.

So those who still maintain a moral system are forced into ever-tightening poses, fenced in, then left to gaze at the rest of the world from inside a prison of relative safety. We react to danger, instead of acting to prevent it.

When terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania countryside, Americans reacted by creating the cage of the Patriot Act. What was the result? We now have given our government the power and means to enslave its society in the name of "protection."

When a psychopath shoots a roomful of children, ideologues cry out, blaming the instrument of death, rather than the deranged killer behind the gun. What will be the result? We'll see another spate of executive and legislative actions to enact gun control laws which have historically proven to hurt the innocent more than the guilty. In response, moral people have reacted, rather than acted, by buying more guns than ever, in an attempt to provide protection from ever more glorified evil.

The entertainment industry produces movies and television shows that glorify extreme violence, immorality, teen pregnancy, single parent families, homosexuality, and pornography, then claims no culpability when such behavior is not only expressed, but promoted in modern society. Moral people have no recourse but to attempt to ignore those intrusions into their lives from every venue, and find it a nearly impossible task to inoculate their children from such seductive ideals. Parents who care that their children grow up in a moral society are forced to build cages to keep out the vandals.

We, as a society, cannot long last by mimicking the depravities of the Roman Empire, then promoting them as social goods. Yet the good and decent people of America find themselves much like the statue of Myrna Loy, folding in on ourselves, until we are forced inside cages, trapped and prevented from stretching our arm up to the heavens. However, a long as the majority of good and decent people react to evil, rather than acting to prevent it, we will continue to cringe in fear in the cages we built ourselves.