The Movie Box

During the three months that I was away at college, my sister decided that my family needed to clean up the videos that we were watching - not that we were watching bad things, just some not very good things. When I arrived home, I discovered some sixty movies had been taken off our movie shelves, and placed in a white banker box. Just under the lid of the box was a handwritten list of all the movies which were in the box. Beside each title, there was a brief description of the reason that a particular movie had been put in the box. The primary reason was "language", which was scrawled next to almost every single title in my sister's neat-with-a-touch-of-fancy handwriting, accompanied by the occasional "violence" or "disturbing images" label.

A quick scan of the list reveled that quite a few of the movies I really liked, including The Borne movies, Master and Commander, King Kong, and Red Eye, were now in the box. No one else really wanted to get rid of all these movies either; but how does any self-respecting, trying-to-be-good person say "no" to their daughter or sibling when she come up to you and says "There is too much bad language and violence in our movies, and it is having a bad influence on us. Time to reevaluate and get rid of some of them." Whitney definitely had the higher moral ground, and so, rather grudgingly, we allowed her to remove movies from our collection.

Rather then throw the movies away just yet, my sister was told to put the "bad" movies in one of the empty banker boxes. This box now sits on the top shelf in the down-down stairs (or the lowest level of our split level house), and it is rarely opened.

Yesterday night I was going to get a haircut. In my house, mom cuts your hair, and you watch a movie while she is cutting. I walked down stairs to select a movie, and decided to pull the movie box off the shelf to get something to watch from it. Rather than look through the movies one by one, I took the list out and began to read.

As I read through the list, and thought about whether or not the movie really did have inappropriate language, or disturbing images, I found that they were all guilty as charged and realized that the absence of these movies had had a positive influence in our home. I thought about it, and realized that I didn't want to watch something about murder and deceit or listen to swearing. I put the lid back on the box, and put the box back up high on the shelf.

This experience made me realize how intoxicated and desensitized I had become. It also took the resent I had about the movies being put in the box, and even the desire to watch them.

To all the good people out there who are trying to be in the world, but not of the world, only to find they slip up: Get your own box! Look through your own movies, or your music, or your books, or your games, or your jokes... Put the "there-only-just-not-so-good" things in a box. Then write on a paper why each thing in the box is there, and read that paper each time you open your box. The result is amazing.

And as always,

Don't forget your daily dose of Music!