Why I will no longer tell my kids to "be good"

"Be good."

I heard that line spoken tonight as my wife and I watched the end of Deep Impact, a film about survival and death in the face of an Extinction Level Event -- a cataclysmic impact with Earth by a comet.  I enjoy it for how it causes one to introspect.  I enjoy the acting overall -- I love Robert Duvall, and I think Téa Leoni is a very underrated actress.

I'd issue a spoiler alert here, but the movie was from before Y2K was a major concern.

I love the fact that Morgan Freeman, as President of the United States, at one point tells the nation that "I believe in God" (and I love the irony of the fact that he actually played God in Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty) and that "I believe that God hears all prayers, even though sometimes the answer is no" (the second one is a slight paraphrase).  It is refreshing to hear such a line from Hollywood, despite the fact that we need to look back to the late '90s for God to be mentioned in some sort of a reverent manner in a film.

But this post is not about the two hours of post-editing, post-production film.  It's about one second -- roughly the time it takes to say the words, "be good."  They were uttered by a space-mission captain via video feed to his roughly eight-month-old son, moments before finalizing a mission from which he would never return.

It made me think of how weak that statement is.

Five Fatherhood Fundamentals, Part Two: Know Yourself

This five-part series examines five fundamental, yet absolutely critical, fatherhood concepts.  This is not an all-inclusive list, but it represents counterpoints to five of the most severely damaging mistakes made by fathers today.

In Part One, we explored Knowing God.

Social media has done something spectacular to the world today: it has essentially stripped everyone of their identities.  It is not that it has made everyone bland.  It is that it has forced everyone to want to be just like everyone else.  It has taken "keeping up with the Joneses" to extreme levels.

What used to be, as a result of cable television and MTV, a desire by many to be like the latest celebrity, has evolved into everyone trying to top everyone else.  The best clothes.  The best shoes.  The latest cell phone.  You have the newest iPad?  I guess I need to go get one too!

It is no wonder that retail sales of non-essential goods has skyrocketed over the course of the last ten years.  Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, hi5, etc.  They have created an instantaneous need for the next big thing by each and every person that it has resulted in two things: a global lack of identity, and levels of personal debt that are shameful and devastating.