On Black Friday

I have things to say about "Black Friday" - and they aren't good.

One of the great distinctions of the modern age is between genuine tradition - the handing down from generation to generation of ideas and practices that people organically over time found to be good - and artificial imposition of ideas and practices via schooling and/or the media. "Black Friday" is a product of the latter, that is, it is manipulation of the public by the businessmen who own the media and the owners of the businesses in general. It is incentive to unnatural behavior that a free people would not consent to engage in. It is a selling out of our freedom and dignity in the name of materialism. It shows that we can be induced to do nearly anything for "a good deal" and, as has been pointed out, even trample over others' rights and bodies in doing so. I can think of no nearer analogy than that of the behavior of sheep.

It is true that business manipulation is nothing new. "Happy Hour" and other discount hours are a normal thing. But most of those fall into patterns consistent with normal human life. Inducing people to do what they would otherwise never do, though, does not, and I think it difficult to argue that people, on the whole, would get up and go shopping at 5:00 am as a matter of course. There are exceptions, of course, as well as eccentricities, but this seeks to make a rule of the eccentricity, whose motivations are not benign or positively good, like a midnight Liturgy, but base and crass, mere material gain. As a "tradition", this is merely to our national shame, and having to explain such bizarre behavior to Russians who see that it is bizarre makes me feel that shame for my people.

The Fall to Sodom

Well it seems not so long ago that I posted this parody, with a cautionary message for the future.

Not long ago I came up with an outline of how sexual morality has fallen over the past century.
I began with the allowance of easy and later no-fault divorces (destroying the idea of the sanctity of marriage), which led to

Social tolerance of infidelity (destroying the idea of a social expectation of the essential faithfulness of the spouses), which led to

Social tolerance of fornication (destroying the idea that the marital act must be contained within marriage), which enabled

Social tolerance of sodomy (destroying the idea that the act must be between a man and a woman) which is currently leading to

Social tolerance of polygamy ( and all names and euphemisms given to its permutations), destroying the idea that the act must be limited to two people, which will lead to...

What? The progression is obvious. Each step was unthinkable until the step before it became a reality. Everyone said "THAT could NEVER happen!" yet it did. We are living with accomplished fact. It's also worth noting that, with the exception if divorce, each act, hitherto seen as a moral evil, each step was enabled by the coinage of a new term to eliminate the moral association. "cheating on", "sleeping with" (now "being with"), "to 'be' gay", now "polyamory" ("many loves") have all been used to approve the moral wrong.

So what next? Well, aside from the fairly obvious decriminalization of polygamy we can expect over the next several years, I think the next steps are fairly obvious - a gradual move toward

approved pedophilia (itself a euphemism, meaning "the love of children", and destroying the idea that the act is for adults alone - starting with a graaadual reduction of the age of consent, and

approved bestiality, destroying the idea that it must be between humans.

People said that openly tolerated homosexual behavior would never happen, yet here we are.

It seems that my parody is less of a parody than I imagined...

When people start "conducting studies" and "advising caution", you know it's just around the corner.