Thought For The Day

A Clearer Picture

I was listening to a radio station early this morning and the personalities were asking people to call them regarding whether Cowboy player Josh Price-Brent should be allowed to play while he is awaiting the results of being charged with intoxication manslaughter.

A couple of people who called said, “No.” They then added some wording about how they “had no sympathy for Brent,” or that because of his actions he should “get what he deserves.”

Ok. Certainly he should be made to answer for any crimes he may have committed (DWI for example), and an individual is dead, perhaps due to his negligence. But how can we feel no responsibility as a society?

Little is “glamorized” more than the consumption of alcohol. It is the “spice of life” and everyone does it. It is the path to “good” times,” “comfort,” “relaxation,” and “excitement of all kinds.” We pump that foolishness out like liquor is nothing more than fizzy water, and expect young men and women who are often wealthy beyond their dreams, moving in circles of people who have little discipline, held to some degree in unearned esteem, and left to their own imaginations, and say we have “no part of the responsibility” for the troubles which so often follow.

Dallas Cowboys nose tackle Josh Price-Brent was ordered held on $500,000 bond today on an intoxication manslaughter charge, as he mourns the “horrific and tragic loss” of his teammate, Jerry Brown Jr., who he viewed as a brother. (ABC News)

Of course we must take responsibility! I don’t know this man, his history, his career, his education, or his maturity. But I feel a hurt for him, I feel we (our society) have failed him – along with so many others. How can we not be distressed that one young man is dead and another will have much of his life destroyed by the very thing our society promotes as “the high life.”

The Scripture is clear – and I am quite aware that it teaches temperance, not abstinence – “Wine is a mocker, beer is a brawler, and whoever staggers because of them is not wise. Woe to those who rise early in the morning in pursuit of beer, who linger into the evening inflamed by wine. At their feasts they have lyre, harp, tambourine, flute, and wine. (Proverbs and Isaiah)

In other words, it’s party time!

At the very least, we owe our children, our teens, our young men and women (even mature adults) the TRUTH.

If drinking booze is OK, and wise people are never hurt by it, then let’s try an experiment. Along with every booze commercial, every advertisement, every promotion of the “high life,” let’s add a few photos of tragic automobile wrecks; an excerpt from the story like the one above; a drunk vomiting in an alley; a wife beaten nearly to death by a drunken husband; the bruised and broken body of a child “disciplined” by a mother who drank all day. On the other end of the billboad, with the beautiful girl wearing almost nothing, on the beach enjoying a beer, while waiting for “you” to show up, put a picture of three drunk, dead teens in a destroyed automobile that was traveling just over 100mph when it they hit the tree. Or put a picture of the family, who, while on their way to Church were hit by a drunk driver, killing the mother and one child and putting the other child and the father in the hospital in critical condition. I help “pick up” that one.

Then young men and women will have an opportunity to choose more wisely, don’t you think?

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