Conflicitng Messages In Our Society Today

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate May 2001

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Conflicting messages, they are all around us in the world today, it is hard to avoid negative messages sent to us by the media, television and even by people we see and communicate with all the time. It is difficult to try to live well by the teachings of God and try to sort out what is right and wrong in our society today. Sometimes there are so many negative messages being sent out to us by various sources that it does not hit us as hard as it should, for example, we hear about people dying from lung cancer all the time and how cigarette smoke is incredibly bad for your health yet you still walk down the street and see people smoking. The truth should affect much more then it seems too. You have to also understand that I am not saying that the negative messages that we hear are totally bad for us.

You have to learn how to use negative messages to your advantage to become a more knowledgeable and well rounded person and how to use the positive messages of the gospel to become a better and a more moral human being. The values of the media can often become confusing to a young person today, we try to live our lives according to the morals taught to us by the lessons of the gospels but it is hard to do that when we turn on the new and we hear about murders and other chaos in our society. What kind of world do we live in when we cannot even trust our own president to tell us the truth, what kind of message is this sending out to young people today? That we can lie without having to suffer the consequences, I do not believe that this is what we want our children to learn and believe in the future.

We need to start to recognize more fully the affect of conflicting messages in our lives today. There are many different ways that I believe we can do this. We can start putting more positive things on the news along with all of the negative information that we hear about every day. By putting positive stories on the news we can start to take a more positive outlook on life. Wouldn't it be better to hear about someone doing work to make our society a better place to live, or to hear about people committing crimes, by hearing the good things that happen in the world around us, we in return can start to do things to make our world a better place to live. Another thing we can do is start having more shows on television that send out the word of the gospel and more positive messages to young people, but are also entertaining at the same time. There are way too many shows on television today that send mixed messages to young people, there are many shows that teenagers watch that contain subjects like having sex before marriage, and people doing drugs, that almost send out the message that this kind of behavior is okay for teenagers, but we have to learn that this is not appropriate material for us to live better lives. Another suggestion is that we can start having more classes in schools, even public schools that teach positive, moral lessons to young people. We need to get the lessons of the gospels across to young people in any possible way that we can and the more that we do this the better our society will become. If we could do any of these things, or any of many more ways of putting out more positive messages to young people then we probably would not have as many of the problems of rebellion as we have today.

A good way for teenagers to learn good moral values is in their religion classes in school. By going over the bible everyday and talking in depth about the lessons that the gospel teaches us, we learn to become better people. This way of learning is not possible for many young people in public schools. Maybe we could have religion or morality classes as an after school program or as an elective. I know from personal experience that morality class is interesting and sends out many good messages on how to deal with everyday problems and life's issues. By making this class voluntary there should not be a problem with people saying that religion should not be taught in public schools, and many teens would find this a good opportunity to have conversations with teachers that you would not usually have in school.

As a conclusion to this essay I will state that no matter how hard we try and how hard we work we will never be able to escape from all negative messages being sent out to us. We have to learn how to live morally and not to be persuaded by sources that do not want the best for us. Throughout our lives we will have to deal with conflicting messages all around us, but we have to learn to stay near God, and to live by the teachings of him. We have to learn how to turn negative messages into positive messages for future generations.