How to defeat selfishness....

Originally, I had a witty first two paragraph about the movie Bride Wars which was recently released, but I decided to cut that bit out and get to my point.

Marriage has become a fad. Socially, marriage is now portrayed on the big screen as made up of a bunch of expensive stuff and, oh by the way, a life commitment. But the actual couple getting married seems almost a side note to the DJ, wedding photos, reception space, wedding dress designer, and how much money was spent on the wedding invitations. It’s almost as if the actual ceremony is now thrown in just the please the parents. An even the life commitment is now questionably fake as well. When girls are planning their weddings to their second and third husbands, something is wrong.

In C.S. Lewis’s essay We have no right to Happiness, he states, “A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women.” In our class discussion, someone agreed to that statement, saying, “Just look at the number of single mother.”. Society embraces single parents. Perhaps not whole-heartedly, but you never see the worn out single mother coming home to her crying baby after working triple shift at Cosco. No! No one wants reality on primetime. You always see the up beat, cool single mom miraculously balancing kids, work, and putting herself through school. A woman no longer needs a man to raise her own kids, and girls who get that into their heads are in trouble.

I think what we should worry more about than whether we have the right to be happy or not is how society has lost a sense of shame. We’re almost to the point where we might as well be pre-forbidden fruit and have no concept of the word at all. While I could go on saying how Lewis was right about the man’s infidelity, I must say that men (and women) have been committing adultery for centuries and most likely will continue to. The only way that the amount will go down is if we bring shame back into the equation. Shame is the only means we have to control our own selfish desires, and without it, we are free to do as we please with no consequences.