Today's Spiritual Message: Generation Me

http://www.generationme.org/aboutbook.html

Do you ever get the feeling we're becoming more and more self centered?

Do you ever hear the phrase, "Just do what's right for you"? or "right is whatever you think it is"?

It seems like more and more our world is becoming more and more about ME! and what I think.

Take children, for example.  Why would I want them?  They'll just get in the way of my career.  The unsolicited marketing on the right is a "prime time" example of this self-interest.  "Ask how Start Over from Time Warner Cable makes [your children's] bedtime your [me:time]."  Yes, why would I want to do something so cavemanishly prehistoric as pay attention to my children at bed time!? Heck, why not just put them in front of the TV for the rest of their life so I can enjoy perpetual "me time" bliss?  Or, better yet, why even have children when they just get in the way?

Lest you think I've latched on to one skewed example from Time Warner Cable, I provide two more:  McDonald's and Star Bucks.

Just recently, I noticed two separate coffee cups of my friend and classmate.  Each cup, from the respective organization, had in capital letters the word "YOU" - where it couldn't be missed.

Small coincidence?

You guessed it, today's marketing is all about "you," which from our, or the consumer's perspective, would be . . . ME.

Well did President Ezra Taft Benson declare 21 years ago (in a talk I highly recommend), "Pride is the universal sin, the great vice."  He reminded us that pride caused the fall of two great American civilizations, the Jaredites and the Nephites, and will be the cause of many more.  He continued,

The proud make every man their adversary by pitting their intellects, opinions, works, wealth, talents, or any other worldly measuring device against others. In the words of C. S. Lewis: “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. … It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.” (Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan, 1952, pp. 109–10.)

How fitting then, that I or ME be at the center of all I do, of everything.

As President Benson testifies, so do I:  Humility is the antidote to pride.  And what better example of humility than the Savior Jesus Christ?  His sole mission was to do the will of someone else, His Father (3 Ne. 27: 13), which was to offer His sinless Son up as a sacrifice for all mankind (John 3: 16).  Yes, Christ is the perfect example of selflessness.  He did not devalue His own life; He cherishes the lives of others.

I testify that He is the Son of God and that as we follow His example, we can cleanse ourselves from the onslaught of worldly pride and from the expanding "Generation Me."