Wow.

It’s not very often that something happens to me that actually leaves me floundering for words, but all I can say is…wow.  And not in a good, positive sense of the word, but more of the shock and dismay sense.

Last night, as I rode the bus home from work, I had to endure a conversation between a 17-year-old girl and her two friends.  Actually, to be completely fair, the entire bus had to endure this conversation.

How to characterize it.  Well, let me put it this way.  I’ve been around a lot of guys in locker rooms and have heard the typical “locker room banter” that goes on there.  Compared to what this girl said, the most perverse of the locker room talk might as well have been a Sunday sermon.

In a ride that lasted barely twenty minutes, I found out the following information about this girl.  First, she has had sexual relations with 22 people (of which 6 were men and 16 women) and she planned on hooking up with another person within the week.  She ran away from home when she was fifteen and gave birth to a child.  She really, really likes her drugs and went on for quite some time about her “gravity bong.”  And, finally, she likes to beat up other women (although the term she used wasn’t “women”) and, according to what she said, she’s left several women “for dead.”

Now I’m certainly sure that not everything she said was true, but she went into enough details to assure everyone that there was at least a grain of truth to every single one of her claims.  And as I sat there on the bus, a Scripture suddenly popped into my mind (although I couldn’t remember the reference at the time and had to look it up).

It was Jeremiah 6:15.

Were they ashamed when they committed abomination?  No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush.

Here was a girl who wasn’t even a legal adult yet who didn’t know how to blush.  She engaged in behavior that was so perverse even people who engage in similar behavior find it an extreme.  And there in public she flaunted everything.  Yes, the metaphors about the prostitution of Israel from Isaiah and Jerermiah certainly make more sense now.

Naturally, my first reaction was a visceral one.  I felt like someone had opened up a cess pool right next to me and was splashing around in the sewage.  I felt disgusted by this girl.  But as I walked the distance from the bus stop to my house, I started to think about it more and realized that for all the depravity that was on display then, there was a deeper lesson for our culture.

This woman really was ashamed of what she has done.  It’s probably not at a conscious level, but deep inside she really did feel shame for it.  And to cover up the fact that she felt shame she had to pretend that she didn’t feel shame at all.  She had to pretend that what she was doing didn’t affect her in the slightest, that it was “normal” for her to engage in such behavior.  And to delude herself into thinking that, she did that which would be most effective: she boasted about her sinfulness in public.  After all, boasting in public means you don’t care about your sins, and if you don’t care about your sins then the shame of them doesn’t hurt so much….right?

But of course that doesn’t solve the problem.  Sex and drugs and beating up other people are only a temporary outlet for her to drown out the pain of her shame.  For a short time, it does work.  She doesn’t feel so bad because she can focus on the pleasure she gets from those experiences.  But then reality crashes back in.

So she repeats the behavior and she feels a little better, but there’s a catch.  See, now she doesn’t feel as good as she did the first time.  Perhaps it’s because she knows that reality will come back, that what she is doing isn’t fixing the problem but only delaying it slightly.  The high doesn’t last as long, so she has to do it more and more often.

Until finally she’s at the point where none of the behavior works.  She is left despising herself, which isn’t what she wants, so she pretends that it’s all good.  She forces herself to believe that what she’s doing isn’t bad.  She justifies her decisions by holding onto her false presuppositions as long as she can.

But always the truth is there in the back of her mind.  The problem isn’t fixed by what she does, because the problem is her.  When the highs from her behavior wear off, she is still left with being her…only now she has even added shame for her poor attempts.

My feelings toward this girl changed from outright disgust to more of a feeling of sadness.  Our culture is, on the whole, just a different version of this girl.  We glorify sex, drugs, and violence on TV, in the movies, in video games.  Where, then, is this girl supposed to turn?  The entire world promises her only that which she is already engaged in, and she knows deep inside that that just doesn’t work.  The proof is in the fact that she had to defile herself in public to pretend that it doesn’t hurt so bad.

Our culture is defiling itself in public for the same reasons that this girl was.  And the same underlying despair is always going to be present.  Until the root of the problem is addressed, there can be no cure.  There will only be travel from one fix to the next, with the dreaded knowledge that all it accomplishes is a slight delaying of the inevitable.