I, for one, as a reluctant follower of media narratives - one in particular - have come so far to take such vicious loathing and contempt for granted as the currency of our times that when I sat down to watch Morgan Neville's Won't You Be My Neighbor?, a loving and unpretending film about a loving and unpretending man, namely Fred Rogers of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood," I suddenly and unexpectedly felt the urge to bawl like a baby.
Whatever may be the case with other instances in which we may be called upon to love, in the Gospel's words, our neighbor, surely no Christian can doubt that it always applies with children.
As Mr. Rogers himself put it in an interview, excerpted here: "I don't think anyone can grow unless he is accepted exactly as he is."
Paradoxically, Mr. Rogers was teaching children to feel by teaching them the vital lesson that the "Love" enjoined upon us by Jesus wasn't about feeling but about respecting people no matter how you felt about them.
All this is wonderful and fully deserving of the hagiographical treatment given to the late Mr. Rogers - he died in 2003 - but I keep coming back to the apparent futility of his life's work when so many of the millions of children to whom he showed unconditional love must have grown up to be the haters who dominate the media today.
The reality referred to by Mr. Rogers can only have been a hopeful one, a potential one - one that he and many others of his own era and of ours thought that they could help to bring about through the magic of new and ever better communications and technologies.
Could it be that it was the disappointment of these hopes, like the disappointment of so many other utopian hopes in the last couple of centuries, which turned love into hatred? The problem with teaching children that they deserve to be loved, even by strangers, the way God loves them - "The way you are right now,/The way down deep inside you" - is that they are being set up for huge disappointment when they find out that the world outside their family and the comforting parental figure on TV isn't at all like that.
https://spectator.org/the-tragedy-of-mr-rogers/
Whatever may be the case with other instances in which we may be called upon to love, in the Gospel's words, our neighbor, surely no Christian can doubt that it always applies with children.
As Mr. Rogers himself put it in an interview, excerpted here: "I don't think anyone can grow unless he is accepted exactly as he is."
Paradoxically, Mr. Rogers was teaching children to feel by teaching them the vital lesson that the "Love" enjoined upon us by Jesus wasn't about feeling but about respecting people no matter how you felt about them.
All this is wonderful and fully deserving of the hagiographical treatment given to the late Mr. Rogers - he died in 2003 - but I keep coming back to the apparent futility of his life's work when so many of the millions of children to whom he showed unconditional love must have grown up to be the haters who dominate the media today.
The reality referred to by Mr. Rogers can only have been a hopeful one, a potential one - one that he and many others of his own era and of ours thought that they could help to bring about through the magic of new and ever better communications and technologies.
Could it be that it was the disappointment of these hopes, like the disappointment of so many other utopian hopes in the last couple of centuries, which turned love into hatred? The problem with teaching children that they deserve to be loved, even by strangers, the way God loves them - "The way you are right now,/The way down deep inside you" - is that they are being set up for huge disappointment when they find out that the world outside their family and the comforting parental figure on TV isn't at all like that.
https://spectator.org/the-tragedy-of-mr-rogers/
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