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Mortal Lenses
Music and morality
When I was fifteen, a good friend of mine cautioned me against being too “moralistic.” In fact, as best I remember it, his exact words were,
“Don’t get moralistic on me.”
I think I had been scolding him about smoking cigarettes, and maybe there is nothing more insufferable than your best teenage friend going all Miss Morals on you. He eventually gave up smoking but not because I said to. We make statements and judgments of our selves and others all the time, and it’s right that occasionally, and with good reason, that we get called on it. And that we figure this stuff out in our own time and place.
I say all this first to speak for and about myself. I can be pretty judgy and intolerant and even close-minded about what I think is right or wrong. And it’s not even that I find right and wrong to be relative or wholly objective, either. We have to make decisions based on what we see and hear and have learned. These aren’t always satisfying decisions, and they definitely aren’t always forever decisions.
I learned today that someone I thought I knew well once upon a time recently got divorced. I hadn’t kept up with that marriage, but when I heard the news, though I didn’t know about the divorce and wouldn’t have seen it coming necessarily, I wasn’t stunned. I don’t know how or why it came…
