Terry Mosher 3

TERRY MOSHER

 

So Russell Wilson goes to see 50 Shades of Grey Movie and gets ripped for claiming to be a Christian and then watch and apparently enjoy a movie that most would say is full of depravity.

To clarify, I have not seen the movie, nor do I plan to.  I am not claiming to be a goody two-shoes, but there are things (and movies) I would rather not see, and this is one of them.

The lesson learned here is two-fold. One is that Wilson tarnishes his image of being almost too good to be true. The simple fact he is a divorced man proves he is human and may not be as “too good to be true” as we want to believe. Then when he puts a thumb-up stamp of approval on this movie he further distances himself from being a goody two-shoes.

We all have our dark sides and most of the time our dark side does not show itself.  In rare cases, the dark side overwhelms the good side and we wind up having to fear a, let’s say for example, a serial killer.

I don’t think we are seeing the dark side of Wilson. It does, however, make you feel that Wilson is more human then we have thought. That could be good or it could be bad. I’m guessing as his NFL career progresses we will find out more things about Wilson that will make him feel to us that he’s more like the rest of us who are imperfect human beings. That may make us feel better about ourselves because we will then know that he is not much different than the rest of us. The only real difference is he is a heck of a good quarterback and we are not.

The second part of this is that the movie shows where we are in society. If you are as old as I am you will remember when life was a lot simpler and had the appearances of being more pure, even if it was not.

Critics will say that even as we have made progress and have discovered better ways to live life we have also taken huge steps backwards when it comes to morals.

Just take movies as an example. Back when I was a young kid movies were full of innocence. I remember when there were serial movies and the hero was always seen at the end of each episode as possibly getting injured or even killed, and then the next week the movie would show how the hero escaped all that at the last second (and of course the end of that would show him in danger again).

That was about it as far as showing darkness in a movie. And there was little or no sex and a no-no was curse words in the movies.

The first movie I can remember that appealed to our dark side was Peyton Place, a 1957 movie that create a sensation for its wicked ways and generated over $25 million in sales, which at the time was a tremendous amount for a movie.

I and my brother Dave went to see the movie in Bellingham and we were excited to see something that was unusual for the times we lived. The best thing I remember about it is not the movie, but at the box office the female cashier asked my brother to see his student body. He was not familiar with having to show a student body card to buy a student-priced admission ticket and was stunned with the question, but he quickly regained his composure and replied, teasingly, “Right here?”

That was about as risqué as we ever got.

Now, of course, I don’t have to tell you what is shown and said in the movies of today. I kid my teenage son because he loves those action flicks like “Iron Man” where entire cities get destroyed and nobody gets killed. Buildings are exploding and falling down, cars are thrown through the air, and nobody is killed.  Whenever he comes back from one of those movies, I ask him how many people were killed.

“Knock it off, dad,” is usually his reply.

But there are plenty of movies today that show sex, blood and gore and killings accompanied by most of the swear words that were unthinkable not just in movies in my teen years but were not uttered in mixed company. Now wherever you walk you can hear the swearing going on all around you.

I blame the information age we are in for a lot of this. We all have almost instant access to whatever is going on in the world, and for a lot of us we gain that information through our smart phone we hold in our hand. We can see in real time wars that are going on in various parts of our world. The result is that we become to accept as normal things and become insensitive to killings, even the beheadings we associate with ISIS.

No wonder that almost every day you can read or see somewhere in our country where somebody walked into a mall or a store or school and starts randomly shooting.

If you are older than the Olympics as I am, you know that the generations below us are growing up in a vastly different world and are becoming accustomed to things we would never have even dreamed about when we were kids.

Bottom line is I don’t know where all this is leading. The ISIS fighters believe that they are leading us into the end times as explained in the Bible, and that the big battle will happen in the swath of land they have conquered in Syria.

Whether that happens or not, we are certainly living in a different world then what I was used to growing up in the southwestern part of New York State. It’s extremely dangerous out there and the current situation in the world is reflected in popular music of today and in the movies we see. If Peyton Place were to be shown today it would not cause a ripple of conversation.

So when Russell Wilson goes to the movies and sees a film like 50 Shades of Grey, he is doing what hundreds of thousands of others are doing. So we need to give Wilson a pass on this, and tell ourselves that he is just like us – human after all.