Pornography ...

This post is actually a comment I posted to my friend CJ's blog. I'm reposting it here, slightly reworded for context because the thought needs to be known, needs to be spread. 

I was in conversation last night with the lads and lasses I game with, they who are being so very generous with me by sharing the reality they see, youth in the 18 to 25 range of life. Their attitudes, their fears and hidden hopes go a long way towards explaining at least a portion of the situation.

In the conversations between CJ and myself we've agreed to say that pornography is that which is anti-life while the erotic is that which supports life.  There are a great many images floating loose in our world, open for any and all to view, which are in point of fact pornography but not of necessity sexual pornography.  There are a multitude of pornographies in our world.  There is sexual porn, of course, but equally there is pistol porn, blood porn, money porn, power porn, love porn (as a thing separate from sexuality, the influence of love misused).  These pornographies attack different areas of life, but are in fact still pornography, the perversion of that which supports life into that which consumes and destroys life.  We are living in a totally pornographic world, it is so terribly saturated with porn. 

I've known this for some time now, but these last weeks of keeping company with the youth has brought the gravity of the situation into full focus.  The youth I'm keeping company with are in the process of rejecting these various forms of pornography, fortifying their own attitudes on many subjects beyond the sexual to withstand the glut of anti-life their elders have put before their eyes, eyes that have witnessed the failure of the family from the perspective of the children of those failed families. 

The subject of CJ's post was the still life, art depicting the objects of life, and these have indeed been pressed into service to support the various pornographies.  It is little mystery why.  She mentioned one particular image, a picture of  living flesh pierced with hooks.  Gross, yes, but easily interpreted.  Modern society has so very many hooks in people, the various forms of porn I listed make a decent list of categories for all those different hooks.  The most extreme example of that symbolism I've ever seen literally involved a meat hook intended to hang a thousand pound steer carcass, blunted and de-barbed of course but still a meat hook, inserted in a woman's rectum to hold her by her pelvic bones so she couldn't move her hips in response to the torment and torture being applied to her genitals, the flogging of her skin.  What facet of modern life might that represent?  There is some totally sick sh** out there, and the stench of it is growing.

But the cause is not lost.  Like I said, the youth are building their defenses against it, they are seeing cePornography for what it is in all it's abysmal misery, they recognize the monster that collective entity really is.  They know that collective for what it is, they've watched what it did to their parents.  They've not put names to all of the nuances, but their souls are rallying in defense of their lives.  In many ways they are making a stand even more heroic than say the Royal Air Force's stand in defending it's homeland against the onslaught of the Nazi war machine.  I do not jest, nor am I overstating the situation.

It is up to us, we who are their elders, we who must share in the responsibility of having loosed that monster into their world, to provide them the weapons to fight that war, to make that defense.  It is up to us to give them sanctuary, comfort and support, because when one sets aside the assumptions of older and essentially obsolete eras to really talk to them, to step into their reality and look up the years at our times?  It is so terribly easy to see the battle fatigue so very deep in their eyes.