Hero worship is a serious problem in our country.  It’s not just because of the lack of positive role models; rather the lack of self-esteem coupled with peer pressure.  At 2:00AM one morning, a Lutheran Minister and I were sitting in an all-night diner discussing baseball.  We got onto the subject of the fans and then after a course of Eggs and Hash browns, we had come to the conclusion that the world’s problems all stem from insecurity.

Have you ever wondered why little girls see Miley Cyrus as a hero or role model for “Twerking”?  It’s because she gets attention.  Forget about the indecency of the act, is this what women feel they need to do to be noticed?  Going back to the first statement, it’s about insecurity.  Bad behavior is about insecurity.  (Bad attention is better than no attention).  We see this in many of the mass killings.  The killer will kill with no regard for consequences because it’s the attention they are generating.  How many times have neighbors of mass killings been interviewed only to hear: “He was such a nice boy and use to help people in the neighborhood”?  We even have a disgusting yet sad video of a young killer who was in angst because he couldn’t get the good looking girls to like him.  Ironically, I can only remember his face from the video and can’t even remember his crime, other than he killed several people.

It’s true from the clothes that we wear, to the cut of our hair, to the music we hear and the brand of our beer.  It has to be acceptable as we’ve let it define us.  We divorce because somewhere in the relationship the seeds of insecurity were sown.  Kids with new Jordans get killed if they get caught alone on an off street.  Look at how far we’ve come from going to school bare foot in the snow.  (A popular fable my parents use to tell me, even though they grew up in California).  150 years ago, insecurity was coming home with nothing for the family to eat.  Now it’s living in a tract home versus a custom home or driving a domestic economy car versus a European sports car.

The greatest generation deserved the title.  They did what they had to do to defeat Hitler.  (My feelings on the excessive bombings of Dresden and Nuremburg aside), they made America a better place for the boomer generation.  Then they SPOILED us.  In the 60s, marketing became ubiquitous on radio and television and every house needed a “Frigidaire”.  In the 80s every house needed a “VCR” and a “Jacuzzi”.  In the 90s every house needed high speed internet, and after Y2K everybody needed a cell phone and a big screen TV.  We’re so spoiled, our biggest problem is having too much food to eat.  Do you get the picture?  But the single most important thing we often fail to attain is something you can’t buy at Wal-Mart.  Attention.  You can buy bling and get people to look at you, but to connect with people and exchange concerns for one another is the hard part.