The march for our people, our nation, our world... our very lives.

You know those songs that you hear that bring you back to that one time in your life? Those songs that you hate to hear in public because you start to tear up? Music influences us in a good way, and sometimes in a bad way.  The same thing happens with movies, the same thing happens with the news. Movies, Music, News, the list goes on. What we listen to, what we watch, what we spend time on shapes who we are and affect who we will be. Media and entertainment is something that we tend to spend a lot of time with, but as always I ask why? What i want to question in the post is what are we allowing to influence us and where are we spending our time?

I learned this lesson the hard way in an almost amusingly situation. For one whole year in speech and debate I studied terrorism, the whole year that was my section of expertise. So what happened? I caught myself scanning crowds at six flags, I caught myself constantly thinking about terrorism, even subconsciously. The news is constantly focused on the negative, good news just doesn't sell the same. Movies are becoming increasingly violent and more gory. I was shocked to discover the statistics on  this subject... The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) reported that by the time the average young adult in America reaches the age of 70 they will have spent, on average, 7 to 10 years of the lives watching TV. The American Psychological Association reported  that by the time the average American has turned 18 they have watched over 200,000 violent acts on their TV alone. What about music? Well, A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that kids between the age of 8 and 18 listen to about 2 and a half hours of music every day. Through over 2,000 scientific studies, reviews, and papers the AAFP concluded that the increasingly violent act we are watching and consuming leads to aggressiveness, desensitization to violence, bullying, fear, depression, and even insomnia and nightmares.

The clearest affects we can find of music is how is affects our emotions, it can pump us up or it can my us cry. They can help us through our darkest moments or make them darker. Lacrae's song "Prayin for you" was there for me at a critical point in my life, Billy Boyd's "Last Goodbye" was there time and time again, the list goes on. I can't hear a song about the military without tearing up and overflowing with love and respect for our men and women of valor. I like almost every kind of music, except heavy metal (because it's just not music, sorry Trevor, John, and all you other people who think it is) and most rap. With rap specifically I enjoy the beat but i have always detested the message that is in most of it. A study was done on rap that showed people who listened to rap were more likely to accept the use of violence, accept violence against women, and make violent or aggressive acts themselves.

What is the point of the paper? The moral of this story? I have always loved Psalm 19:14 where it says "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sigh, Lord, my rock and my redeemer." The things we are watching and hearing are also consuming, thinking about, allowing to affect us. Let me clarify, different things affect different people. I am not against listening to music (I am right now), I am not against watching movies (I'm going to today), and I am not against keeping up with the news (goodness that would be hypocritical. What I want you to get from this is the only way we can keep grounded is if we continually go back to the source of truth. Everything in media has a message for better or for worse. If Luke 6:45 is true and

"A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of."

Then what are we filling our hearts with? We blame school shootings on the guns when it was the conclusion of the aforementioned studies that it is the environment we are raising these kids in, the violence we have come accustomed that is the root cause and the greatest cause of school shootings, of mass shootings, of violence in modern day America. It is not the guns that need to change, not the laws that are the issue, but our hearts that have become infected and desensitized. Did you know that in a given year, more children will  die from gunfire than will die from cancer, pneumonia, influenza, asthma, and HIV/AIDS combined?!

There are two parts to this march for our lives. I am not concerned about y'all becoming violent, abusive, scumbags. It's just not who you are. For y'all what happens is when you're feeling depressed you'll listen to depressing music, sad songs. The music we listen to and the movies we watch changes what we thing about, how we talk, what we talk about. What are you letting influence you? What is affecting your heart? How is it influencing you?

The second part is what we support and how it affects the people around us. If we want to change the world around us, change our media, change our music, change our movies. If we are concerned for the violence that surrounds us, don't march around like little children whining about the fruit of the tree you helped to grow. Support films that give a good message and avoid excessive violence, support the news agencies who don't add in the unneeded gory details, support music and artists who don't glorify violence and hate.