A pastor in Rockford, Illinois is trying to be discerning for his daughter. It’s worth reading the whole post if you are a parent. Parenting is a tough job but thinking biblically about our culture is crucial. Here’s a snippet:
Hannah Montana’s Miley Stewart Destiny Hope Cyrus’ dad, says it’s “art imitating life imitating art” (TIME). It’s almost mind-bending if you try to think about it too long. “What my fans get, which parents have a harder time grasping, is they know who’s underneath Hannah Montana,” opines the fourteen-year-old sociological savant. “They like the girl who’s underneath.” source In your dreams. Tween girls are too superficial to even be cognizant of the fact that there is such a place as underneath. Or, maybe we should clarify which level of “underneath” Cyrus means? Does she refer to the Miley Stewart or is she so hopelessly caught up in the euphoria of the Hannah Hurricane herself that she actually thinks that the millions of tween girls of America actually know Destiny Hope Cyrus? And, by the way, Cyrus is in the process of legally changing her name to Miley Ray Cyrus. Is that because it was the nickname her daddy used for her or is it because she, the real person, is now attempting to tap into the idolized Miley, the fictionalized real person of Hannah Montana? I guess we’ll never know. But since she’s fourteen, I think it is naïve to assume that the line between “art” and “life” hasn’t gotten blurred somewhere. Destiny how now taken on the name of the fictional real person named Miley. Wouldn’t that now be life imitating art imitating life imitating art? What’s wrong with reality? I personally think that if we want to rear our children to become world-changing adults we need to teach them early to shun marketed fads that are projected on their age group exclusively, thus isolating them from their parents, more mature affections, and reality thereby giving them a sense of belonging that ultimately weakens their will to be different in the real world. To allow our children to follow after the herd just because they’ve been branded as a particular niche in the market teaches them subconsciously that the market knows what’s best for them. It produces lemmings who are being trained to think that the only things in life that are pleasant to anyone their age are those things that were designed exclusively for their age and the only ones who know what those things are happen to be the invisible marketing gods. And this is the main problem with the Hannah Montana music…. If my daughter likes little girl things because she is a little girl that likes those things, that is one thing. But if she likes something because “showbiz hustlers” and her peers like it then she has begun the dangerous descent into the abnegation of self as a unique person created in the image of God and the quiet mutation into a bland copy of of a fickle mob. That’s why sometimes littler girls need to learn to love what daddy’s love instead.
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