Just returned from a few days in Galveston, relaxing on the beach with my family. Last night, we caught Roman Holiday (the old movie starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn). I'd never seen it before. I recommend it.
Sure, it's entertaining, it's clean, and it's always fun to be amazed at how rail-thin Ms. Hepburn was. But the real meat of the thing is its message, which is really very simple: duty trumps pleasure. How many people absolutely refuse to do the very thing they were created to do, called to do, the thing that the moment demands, simply because it is an unpleasant task? We prefer rampant STDs over long-term personal health because maintaining a monogamous heterosexual marriage is difficult in this day and age. We'll turn in our firearms because standing up for our Creator-endowed rights might turn out to be uncomfortable (are the printing presses next?). We'll put our kids in government-run schools, drugging our young men with Ritalin and such, allowing them to be molded into politically-correct atheist illiterati, rather than exerting the considerable effort involved in "bucking the system" and giving them a proper classical education. God forbid they should actually have to bear the burden of conscious thought!
We need to arise from our government-education-inspired stupor, learn once again what it means to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Christ. We have a duty as freemen, as Christians, to exert every effort to educate the next generation about the Bible, the Declaration, the Constitution, and what their precepts really mean to us as Americans. Likewise, we have a duty to honor those same precepts with our lives, regardless of how unpleasant it may be at times.
Posted by jon at May 17, 2003 12:11 AM