When the Children’s Television Workshop tells you to step off, that should cause a left of center person to stop and take inventory. Just such a teachable moment has occurred in regards to a facebook petition which insists that Bert & Ernie should get married. Sesame Street has responded that Bert and Ernie are puppets and thus void of sexual orientation.
Thank God the innocence of youth may be preserved for a time, if only during a couple hours in the morning on one or two PBS stations.
Bert and Ernie share what is known as Storge in Greek; it is an affection or fondness through familiarity. Storge would exist between family members or people who are sort of thrust together due to circumstances of fate. I believe they express this type of love more than a Philial love, which is a friendship based upon common interests. Storge can be seen as a more impressive and enduring love than Philia due to Philia’s reliance on likeness.
Bert and Ernie’s great teaching ability comes in an expression of Storge, because they are friends in spite of their differences. This is a valuable lesson to children especially as they interact with other children who are thrown together in play areas, preschools, and every other societal interaction they inevitably encounter in a healthy upbringing.
To turn the expression of their friendship into Eros, or romantic love, is totally dependent upon the caricatured innuendo which the pro Bert and Ernie marriage side would decry from persons such as me. It’s ironic no? Some feel that everything can and should be sexualized beginning at the time of birth. This thrust would liberate children from the mental anguish and shame of a fully realized sexuality.
The antithesis of that POV would be that a disinhibited sexuality is in fact the source of the mental anguish, and the more one focuses on sexuality as a defining personality trait, one inevitably runs into its limitations as the source of self. To save children and adults from the many worrying aspects of sex, these include but are not limited to: fear of unwanted children, fear of being discarded after being used like a box of Kleenex, fear of STDs, fear of becoming undesirable to your mate, and so on, it should be couched within the protection of Agape. Agape is a charitable love, a love of self-sacrifice, the love inherent to a healthy marriage.
Some see Eros eventually evolving into Agape as it is seasoned and see no benefit in being careful with their approach to Eros. Agape is something which becomes deep through charitable action towards the target of our affection. Agape is what takes marriage and relationship through the many storms of human coupling. It’s because humans need to grow into an adequate partner that Agape is so important. Couples tend to highlight each other’s weaknesses and those differences become exacerbated through proximity and over time. Agape calls us to ask ourselves not what is in this for me, but how can I assist my spouse. This assistance is always at the cost of our perceived and superficial self interests. Agape readies a relationship for the onslaught of children.
Children cannot be discarded and so neither can be the expression of love which creates them. This is the function of marriage. Not health insurance and hospital visitation, which one may find a legal way of bequeathing outside of marriage; but the creation of devotion to a family which is the correct place to teach children the nuances of love and relationship, not by making propaganda out of a children’s program. So I applaud Sesame Street on their willingness to stand up again a perverse tide and tendency to sexualize our children.
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