The Patriot Post® · '15 Minutes' -- Is That All There Is?

Andy Warhol was the American pop artist who led the visual art movement known as pop art, based mainly on culture and advertisement that flourished around the 1960s, and his most famous and enduring quote, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.”

If true in Warhol’s context, that means that 15 minutes of fleeting fame, notoriety, or whatever, is the most anyone can expect out of life. 15 Minutes: is that all there is? This adopted modern-day 15 minutes of fame concept may actually be the driving force of random unending violence infecting the day-to-day culture of religiously and morally lifeless people who might be in fact acting out mayhem to gain their 15 minutes.

The consequences be damned; attitude is based on the lack of religious belief about the eventual immortality of man. This attitude taken to a logical extreme means that nothing matters; there is no good or evil; and after death, NOTHING, so what difference does any moral value make as they are not eternal.

Andy Warhol’s era encompassing the 1950s and 1960s birthed the rapidly expanding period of promiscuity, absence of moral certitude and a drifting away from established religious principles and family traditions.

Selfishness is the prime mover in that scenario and the only thing that matters to 15-minute believers is ME, which becomes its own god. Good works are considered to be good because it makes the do-gooder feel good, not because the good actions serve a Creator or basic life directives.

The danger and the fallacy is that do-gooders are attempting to do the right thing, but for the wrong reasons, and that is the root of the oft-failed programs and policies they initiate and carry out. President George W. Bush is a recent prime example of a politician, acting in good faith, committed to doing good by attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, accused of instigating and direct involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the US mainland.

Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck. in his 1937 novel Of Mice and Men quotes a line  from Robert Burns’ poem, “To a Mouse”: “The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.” Bush II learned this lesson the hard way, thinking that brutal American power would create “Shock and Awe” and the enemy would quickly plead for mercy.

Didn’t quite happen that way and like the Pennsylvania Dutch are wont to say, “Too soon we get old and too late we get schmart.” Barack Obama inherited this dire military and fiscal situation from Bush II but evidently learned little as he continued the hated Bush policies while expanding them further to other countries and regions, making any exit policy other than unilateral withdrawal a maze with no possible exit.

One trait do-gooders have in common is their claim to do a better job raising America’s kids but the test is how they raise their own kids, and therein lies the rub. Judging from anecdotal evidence, they do a poor job raising their own but want to impose rules for the rest to raise theirs. They live out the saying about the shoemaker who does not fix the shoes of his own kids, but fixes everyone else’s shoes. Do-gooders policy is “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Do-gooders also want every pregnant woman to kill her baby. America is sad and sick. It is a crime to kill a rat eating a farmer’s produce but it is a badge of honor to kill a baby alive, kicking, and feeling horrible pain. Shame on us, the US, Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Sebelius, Planned Parenthood, Congress, the less than supreme Supreme Court, along with over half the already born who want to prevent other babies from being born.

Federal government is directly involved in writing massive rules and regulations meant to do good for citizens, but in the process use bad policy and regulation means that countermands the good intentions.

Private education sectors has little to boast about as far as doing good is concerned in that in their efforts to creating bridges to antithetical culture; adopt, encourage, and promote, this very culture as prestigious religious-based university presidents go against their carved-in-stone religious and ethical principles.