Jul 15 2008
Church “out of touch” with the young
Via the Curt Jester, a MySpace poll shows the Catholic Church is out of touch with young people. He writes:
Of course what most of these poll (sic) indicate is that people think that the Church is out of touch with the morality of the modern culture, that it is not an echo chamber for current societal ethics. The only thing the Church needs to be in touch with is the Holy Spirit.
If the Church were to bend with trends, it would be no use to anyone – least of all young people. The world is full of “rebels” who are easily swayed to follow trends or parrot conspiracy theories, or gossip about anti-celebrities (who are really just celebrities with anti-establishment reps). The easy way to get them to do what someone else wants? Make them think that someone, somewhere, is against them and they can rebel. (Advertisers took lessons from Satan, eh?)
My “baby” brother told me about a girl he met at college. He found her annoying because she looked down her nose at hicks, geeks, and the out-of-touch. At a party, she went on about a tattoo she really, really wanted to get. He asked her why getting a tattoo was so important.
“I want to be different,” she said, “like everybody else.”
Then she got angry when he laughed his butt off.
http://www.splendoroftruth.com/curtjester/archives/2008/07/o ut-of-touch.php
HA!
I had a similar experience in early high school, actually – I was on the phone with my angsty boyfriend of the time, and he was very earnestly and insistently telling me what a nonconformist he was. I, having an unfortunate propensity for needling people (it’s part and parcel of being a younger sibling), observed that there was at least one what he was actually a conformist: that he fit all the norms of nonconformity. (It was a point my father had made, and I thought it was apt.) He became very indignant and angry, nearly shouting that no, he was a NONCONFORMIST!
(I broke up with him within a week or so.)
Believe it or not, I ran into the same guy the one and only time I went to the Dally in the Alley street fair in Detroit (it’s basically bands, beer, and drug paraphernalia). It was about five years ago now. He was enthusiastically telling me that he’s an anarchist, that he used to live at Trumbullplex (an “anarchist collective” down on Trumbull that looks like it should be condemned before it collapses on its inhabitants), and that he’s a “puppeteer”.
I had mentioned I was working on my Masters. He asked, “In what?”
“Public administration,” I answered with a perfectly straight face (don’t ask me how I managed that).
You should have seen the look on his face.
(I tried, shortly thereafter, to sign up for an e-mail alias of “tool_of_the_man” so I could e-mail him as promised…no luck…)
Oh, Kasia, that is rich! I was choking over the idea of “anarchist collective”. Do they have no sense of the irony?
One of my great joys has been getting back in touch with my college friends and seeing how much happier they are now that they’ve embraced “normal” aspects like marriage (or in the case of one friend, no more “open” marriage). They’re still creative and interesting, but without needless drama.