#thestruggleISreal
By Jessica Greer
As the Millennials continue on their journey of self-discovery and social awareness, the attempt to reconcile the cognitive dissonance between entitlement and reality provides so many pro-choice alternatives that nature can hardly keep up. The goal of achieving a more equitable world goes beyond the political angst peddled by freshman congresswomen who tweet their high school environmental club’s mission statement. The deeper desire of this generation is to live out a paradisiacal fantasy on earth.
Perhaps the Fyre Festival’s immortalized disaster best exemplified this ubiquitous trait in our culture. In 2016, Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule collaborated on what was supposed to be the most epic luxury music festival, Boundaries Pushing the Impossible. In December of 2016, McFarland and his crew released a 60-second media clip of bikini-clad supermodels gallivanting on Pablo Escobar’s exclusive island in the Bahamas, with wild pigs running alongside Hailey Baldwin and Bella Hadid. Clearly, the most relevant celebrities of the time living out the millennial zeitgeist. Social media influencers were hand-picked and paid by McFarland to post the advertisement on their Instagram accounts: here is your chance to hang with famous faces on an exclusive island and dance to bands like Blink-182.
Immediately, followers of the celebrities began to ask for the details. Tickets sold almost instantaneously, with some festival-goers paying up to $45,000 for one weekend. But the festival in its material reality – music venue, villas, luxury tents, 5-star meals, and transportation – didn’t actually exist. It was just in the works. April 28, 2018 marked the opening weekend of the festival. Guests arrived to find a barren island, hundreds of FEMA tents, and withered cheese sandwiches. Needless to say, this was a far cry from the transformative weekend they were sold. The most egregious part of the story was that consumers had no tangible itinerary when they transferred thousands of dollars to McFarland and Fyre Festival; there was only a 60-second Instagram video posted by a person they had never met.
As the media jumped on the story, questioning the collective stupidity of these particular millennials, it became increasingly apparent that this Neverland-ish experience was one of the most successful marketing baits to date. McFarland exploited a deep psychological delusion fully embraced by our culture: our existential fantasy is greater than our pursuit of meaningful purpose.
The Pro-Choice Movement, the Women’s March, and abortion advocates use similar branding in their messaging to this generation. The whole belief in “choice”— substituting our realities for a more conducive environment – reaches a desire so unattainable that humans are physically changing their body parts to morph into an alternate unnatural biology. In her article “Sex Recession” in The Atlantic, Kate Julian dives into a recent phenomenon plaguing first world countries: why are people having less sex as a result of technological alternatives? She points out the obvious culprit of pornography addiction (the new common cold for sexuality) – but within that underbelly she identifies an even stranger appetite: hentai (animated pornography). In Porn Hub’s list of 2017 searches, hentai was the #2 choice.
“Porn has never been like real sex, of course,” Julian said, “but hentai is not even of this world; unreality is the source of its appeal.” She also explores Tinder, swiping into hookups, and the desire of two people to avoid uncomfortable encounters, awkward conversations, and (God forbid) relationship compromise. A free market of choices. Sexual consumerism. I’m no Marxist, but applying a supply-and-demand theory to the human sexual appetite in the digital age has become Industrial Era-hazardous to our society. Couple this entitlement of choice-making with one of the most destructive political movements of our age, the killing of the unborn and the agenda to euthanize the ailing. The most persuasive appeal in this lie is that humans not only have the right to make such a choice, they can make that right a reality; and furthermore, that reality can be justified.
In the last decade or so, “wrongful birth” lawsuits have come into vogue. In 2006 a couple from New York sued their doctor for wrongful birth of their son who was born with Wolf-Hirschhorn Syndrome, which commonly includes mental retardation, physical disfigurement, inability to speak, seizures, and respiratory and digestive problems. The mother argued that her doctor made the late-term discovery that her growing fetus was not normal after the point when the State of New York would allow an abortion; otherwise she would have terminated the pregnancy. Fast forward to 2019, when New York State passes legislation to allow abortion up to 24 weeks. After that, the woman and her doctor can decide the child’s fate using “reasonable and good-faith professional judgment.” The Virginia bill is even more vaguely worded: a woman can have a third-trimester abortion up to the due date if it will “impair the mental or physical health of the woman.”This is no longer merely the human free will to choose; it is the absolute certainty that all choices are justifiably good and that we are entitled to control even the direst of our realities.
Brittany Maynard, a terminally ill woman from Portland, Oregon was glorified as a hero for advocating “death-with-dignity” laws. She argued for the right to die by one’s own choice with a doctor’s support rather than face a lingering death. On November 2, 2014, Maynard died with the assistance of her doctor “as she intended – peacefully in her bedroom, in the arms of her loved ones.”
This is not to minimize human suffering or to make light of the harsh realities that people face – it is part of the human condition. Several years ago I listened as one mom at a parent advocacy seminar described her experience in processing the diagnosis of Down Syndrome in her unborn daughter. As she opened up about the choice she made to keep her daughter, another mother piped up and said, “At least you had a choice! Those of us whose children have autism don’t get that choice.” This was a vulnerable statement and a true reflection of life in a desolate land within the world of parenting. I understood quite well the place from which this point of view sprang.
I myself had been flooded with uncertainty in raising a child with autism. I, too, questioned his quality of life as I slowly trudged down a road without gurus or quick fixes, unable to lean on my own understanding. I felt crushed under my own resistance and lack of choices, clinging to credence in a self-first, self-love pursuit of happiness over pursuit of purpose. My great human frustration was cooked up following a recipe of my belief in living comfortably and doing the will of God while actively attempting to resist my reality. I was scrambling to come up with human answers to spiritual questions. The Word of God contradicts this carnal instinct for the Christian.
The word wilderness is found in the Bible over 300 times. Jewish tradition and memory identify the Israelites wandering through the wilderness as one of the most fundamental roots of their faith. It is the moment in their history when they searched for the Promised Land and encountered God. It was their God-led purpose. Outside of God Himself they did not have a plausible objective. The Hebrew word midbar means wilderness; in Greek it is eremos or isolation. It is in the isolated wilderness moments that humans go into a process of spiritual transformation. The wilderness has been described as uninhabited land where humans are nomads. No agriculture, no natural resources, no civilizations, no natural answers. In Deuteronomy 8: 2-3, Moses said, “Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
The Hebrew word manna means what is it? Manna is a non-earthly means of sufficiency from God. As you read through the Scriptures, God continues to reveal Himself and our human purpose in the wilderness – away from comfort zones, away from family, outside of religious paradigms, and in the most extreme circumstances. This wilderness experience can be daunting to digest. It doesn’t quite add up to our widely accepted church-kid-city-on-a-hill doctrine or our vision of the inheritance of all things good and a life full of self-centric choices mixed with God’s blessing.
Add in a sprinkle of parent approval and… bam! We have a formula to carry us through life. The problem is that formulas are often a stumbling block for faith. The church kid disillusionment due to the detours of life, disappointments, and hardships under the influence of our current cultural climate is a dangerous concoction for our Christianity – especially for those raised in a space sheltered from the ravages of sin. But the choice to be happy extrinsically and to avoid wilderness experiences is a choice to move away from knowing God. Whether Elijah, Moses, Samuel, John the Baptist, Daniel, or Jesus Himself – it was during their time of isolation in the wilderness that God met with these men. The miracle of the wilderness is that God meets us in that place and provides for us.
In Ezekiel 24:35, God says, “I will make a covenant of peace with them and rid the land of savage beasts so that they may live in the wilderness and sleep in the forests in safety.” In Isaiah 43:19 He says, “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” Historically, we have appreciated life due to its harsh brutalities: sweat and toil, working the earth in order to eat, enduring the elements, and other forms of suffering.
Only since the 20th Century – and only for the great minority of humans on this planet – has our lifestyle become so comfortable that we are oblivious to any other form of reality. This preconceived notion of entitlement to a life spared from the wilderness experience is becoming increasingly popular, and it is the antithesis to the Gospel itself. A correlation exists between the epidemic of depression among first-world millennials and their complete lack of purpose. The struggle is the only experience that is truly real, and your meaning in life is found in contending for a purpose greater than yourself. What incredible love, that God would carve out a piece of work for each one of us, and give us an equal opportunity to pick up our little shovel and do His work!
The irony of the Fyre Festival hype versus its reality is the opposite of our experience within Christianity. Within that place where our flesh sees stark need for all survival resources lives a provision promise from God Himself to exceed even our own expectations. In Deuteronomy 30:19 He said, “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” Choose life.