For Shame!

This wee, pull up a rocker at the porch and enjoy the conversation (and some embarrassment) about shame and its value to society - maybe it's been a while since the teeth of shame have been bared - well, let's go!

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SPEAKER_03 0:17

Hello, friends and neighbors, and welcome to Sunnyside. This last week we took our youngest son Colin to a college visit at Iowa State University. And we had a great time. ISU has one of the absolute best business programs in the United States in their Ivy College of Business, and they lead the way in engineering and agriculture. Where will he go? Huh? We're not sure. But there's a good chance we may have a cyclone in our family. Then on Saturday, we attended the wedding of our friend's son Kyle. Now I recruited Kyle to the Iowa Army National Guard around ten years ago. And today he's a staff sergeant planning on attending Officer Candidate School, a combat veteran. And now he's married. He's a married man embarking on an entirely new deployment as a husband that we pray. Well, that lasts a lifetime. Prior to that wedding, Heidi and I attended an auction that was happening at Winnebago Industries, and that was held over the weekend. And I left with a brand new to me anyway, Yale forklift. So I've been lifting so many forks since then. You wouldn't believe it. And we've picked up some other things that I'm sure will come in handy between our ventures here on the farm and the properties and of course this studio. Just before the wedding, and while Heidi was wrapping up our bids at the auction, I had the opportunity to meet, well, I think the next governor of Iowa, all things considered. That's uh Zach Lane. And I have to say, his humble demeanor and off brand real world concepts on public education, regenerative farming, and rural health care, and of course, development ideas were not only refreshing, but they were critical to the future, I think, of our little state. And I also think well we'll be talking to him on one or we'll see. Soon here at the Sunny Side of Life. So stay tuned for that. Now those adventures aside, this last few weeks I've created a list of things that I want to talk about, and completely unrelated to the college visit and wedding ceremony we attended, this week I'd like to well ruminate over the subject of something we all have some experience with, but maybe have never considered its inherent value as a society. Shame. You know what is a baseline truth? We are all born naked. But we are all born into a blanket of rules. And today we look at the invisible switch that flips when those rules are broken. What is shame? Well, psychologists will tell you it is the painful feeling of being fundamentally flawed. Guilt says Well I did something bad. Shame says I am bad. It is the mental sting of falling short, not just in your own eyes, but in the eyes of the folks looking at you from across the fence. It is the social mirror showing you a reflection ha you simply do not want to see. Now for the history. Shame is older than the printing press, of course. It is older than the Roman roads. In medieval Europe, they did not just lock you away, they put you in the town square, locked your head in wood, and let your neighbors throw rotten tomatoes, or whatever fruit they had. Early American Puritans made wrongdoers wear their sins right there on their chests. A big A for everyone to see. Today, well we don't use wooden stocks. We use keyboards. The digital town square can cancel a career even before the sunset. Now you may query, well, how which organizations have proven best at levying shame to improve society? History shows two distinct champions. First, the religious institutions. Well, for centuries, the threat of excommunication or public confession kept the peace when local sheriffs could not. It was a spiritual audit, and nobody wanted to be bankrupt. Second, well that's the public advocacy groups. Now in this case you can think of Amnesty International shining a giant blinding spotlight on governments doing wrong in the dark. Or mothers against drunk driving, also known as mad. Well, they did not just change laws, they made driving drunk a social disgrace. They turned a bad habit into a cultural taboo. What is shame? And is it beneficial as a tool to maintain the common values that we have as a society and our norms? Well, the answer is a hesitant yes, but it comes with a massive warning label. Shame is the glue that keeps people from cutting in line, stealing from the till, or breaking the unwritten promises of a neighborhood. It works faster than a court order and it costs a whole lot less than a police force. But when shame loses its proportion, it becomes a weapon of destruction rather than a tool for correction. It creates outcasts instead of citizens. The real secret of shame is not how society uses it to beat you down. It is how society uses the fear of it to lift you up. It forces us to look in the mirror before we walk out the front door. It keeps us human. You remember 1692? Okay, it's fine if you don't. Sixteen ninety two. Well, that was a bitter winter, biting winter. In Salem Village, Massachusetts, the Puritans who cleared those woods were looking for a clean slate. They wanted a paradise built on strict, unbending devotion, but inside that pressure cooker of piety, a strange and terrible fever began to take hold. It started quietly. A few young girls, bored, isolated, and fed on tales of the occult began to twitch. They choked. They contorted their bodies into shapes no human spine should naturally take. The local doctor came. He looked, he scratched his head, and lacking a medical answer for the bizarre fits, he offered a spiritual verdict witchcraft. Now, the Puritans already believed the devil was hiding behind every pine tree, but they did not start with ropes and gallows. No. They started with shame. In Salem, if you did not fit the mold, you were already walking a tightrope. Well the girls began pointing fingers. They did not target the powerful pillars of the community first, no, they pointed at the margins. They pointed at Tituba, an enslaved woman. They pointed at Sarah Good, a homeless beggar. They pointed at Sarah Osborne, a sickly woman who skipped. The court did not demand hard physical evidence, they accepted what they called spectral evidence. If a girl claimed your invisible spirit was pinching her in her sleep the gavel fell. And the town of Salem turned its back. To be accused was to be instantly cast out. Your neighbors, the folks you traded sugar with the Tuesday before, would no longer look you in the eye. They stripped away your dignity before they ever touched a rope. The ultimate weapon of that courtroom was the crushing weight of public disgrace. If you confessed, you were shamed, but you lived. If you maintained your innocence and stood tall, you walked up Gallows Hill. Nineteen people were hanged. One elderly man was pressed to death. Pressed to death under heavy stones. Over a hundred more languished in filthy, freezing cells, but then the pointing fingers got a little too bold. The girls started naming the highest authorities in the land. They named the wife of the governor himself. Suddenly the blindfolds fell off, the fever broke, the people of Massachusetts looked around at the empty chairs at their dinner tables and realized the terrible thing that they had done. They had allowed suspicion to masquerade as justice. Years later, one of those young accusers, a woman named Anne Putnam Junior You don't usually see a junior after a girl's name. Anyway, she stood up in the crowded Salem church, and by the way, the room was deathly quiet. She did not offer an excuse. She did not blame the devil. Instead, she begged for forgiveness from the families of the dead, admitting she had been blinded by a delusion. The very town that had weaponized shame against the innocent to well all of those people had to swallow a massive, bitter dose of it themselves. Salem renamed itself. They fasted. They prayed for mercy. They learned the hard way that when public shaming becomes a feeding frenzy, it does not protect the village. It burns it down. You know, history doesn't always repeat itself, but it's man, it sure does rhyme. And when it comes to the human pack mentality, the melody is always the same. Let us look at two times that the world lost its collective mind and used the exact same Salem blueprint to do it. Let's go back to nineteen fifty. The world was cold, the atomic bomb was real, and America was terrified of an invisible enemy. Enter a first term senator from Wisconsin, a guy named Joseph McCarthy. He stood before a crowd in Wheeling, West Virginia and held up a piece of paper. He claimed he had a list of two hundred and five communists working right inside the United States State Department. Sound familiar? Well, it was the modern version of spectral evidence. You couldn't see the communism, but the senator swore it was there. Suddenly the hunt was on. The weapon wasn't a noose, it was the blacklist. If your name was whispered in the halls of Washington, your career was over by noon. Actors, writers, teachers, and soldiers, people who had spent a lifetime building a reputation were instantly cast out of the tribe. Neighbors looked at neighbors with suspicion. The frenzy only broke when McCarthy finally pointed his finger just a little too high, attacking the United States Army on live television. Well, there was a brave lawyer named Joseph Welch, who looked him straight in the eye and asked the whole country a question that everyone was thinking to Senator McCarthy. Have you no sense of decency, sir? The fever broke. The Senator was censured. And the nation put its head in its hands, feeling the deep burn of collective shame. But if you think mass hysteria is just a relic of the distant past, let's take a look at the 1980s. It started in Manhattan Beach, California at the McMartan Preschool. A single, mentally unstable mother accused a daycare worker of abuse, but within weeks the narrative spiraled into something straight out of the seventeenth century. Suddenly, there were claims of secret underground tunnels, animal sacrifices, and rituals. The blueprint was identical to Salem. Investigators used leading questions on vulnerable young children until the kids started confessing to seeing things that defies logic. The media fed the fire every single night. And why not? Well the panic spread across the entire nation. Dozens of daycares were targeted. Innocent teachers who loved kids were dragged through the mud, their lives ruined by the mere whisper of an accusation. It took seven years, millions of dollars, and the longest trial in American history to prove it was all a mirage built on smoke and mirrors. No tunnels, no rituals, just a modern day witch hunt driven by the pure unadulterated fear of the unknown. Now the tragedy of mass hysteria is not that we have that we have had bad people among us. The tragedy is that it uses our very best instincts, our desire to protect our country, or our urge to defend our children, and then it twists them into weapons of destruction. We think we are shining a light into the darkness, only to realize we've become the thing we were fighting. You know, there is an old saying that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And when we look back at the jagged edges of history, we often find that underneath the smoke of a mass hysteria, there was indeed a very real fire. Let's look at the ledger again today, but this time we look at the cold, hard facts that the hysteria tried to swallow. Take that dark era of the nineteen fifties. We rightly remember that Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was reckless. He had wild accusations that ruined innocent lives. And we call it rightly so, a witch hunt. But you know what history whispered years later when the top secret Soviet cables were finally declassified in the Venona project? There were communists in Hollywood. Yeah. There were card carrying members of the Communist Party writing screenplays and occupying influential seats in the studio back lots. Huh. While some were well meaning idealists, I guess. Others were feeding information back to an oppressive Soviet regime in Moscow. The tragedy of McCarthyism wasn't that the threat was completely fabricated, the tragedy was that the methods used to fight it were so toxic. They burned the innocent right along with the guilty. Let's fast forward now to 1985. Do you remember Tipper? Well Tippergore and a group of concerned mothers stood before the United States Senate. They were mocked by the music industry. They were called censors and prudes. Even Eminem had a line about it in one of his songs. But strip away the politics and look at what they were actually pointing at. They were holding up lyric sheets. They were looking at a culture that was beginning to normalize music that glorified violence against women, degraded the family, and turned the local police into targets. They weren't imagining things. The words were right there, pressed onto vinyl and sold to children like me. It was a legitimate, agonizing question. Can a society survive if it treats its core values like garbage just for the sake of entertainment? Which brings us to a second, maybe more dangerous point. What happens when a society tries to cure the disease of overzealous shaming by destroying the concept of shame altogether? See, today we see the counteractivity. We see a culture that has decided the ultimate sin is to make anyone feel bad about anything. We've traded traditional standards for total validation. But when you completely remove shame from the public square, you don't get freedom. You get chaos. Shame, when properly measured, is the immune system of a civilization. It is the quiet voice that tells a young person, hey, respect your elders. It is the invisible boundary that stops a businessman from cheating his neighbors. It is the social contract that says we expect better of you. When the counteractivity turns shamelessness into a virtue, well the social glue just dissolves. We lose the common vocabulary of right and wrong. We become a nation of individuals looking out only for number one, with no obligation to the folks that are living right next door. The real danger to America is not the occasional feverish overreaction of a public panic. We've proven we can wake up from those. The real danger is when we stop caring enough about our values to defend them at all. When we become so afraid of offending anyone that we tolerate well everything, we find ourselves living in a house that has no walls. Shame can be a cruel master, but a society with no shame at all? I mean, come on. That is a society with no future at all. You know, we used to have a word for folks who flaunted their worst behavior in the middle of town. We called them t boars. We called them scoundrels. Today we call them t influencers. We look at the ledger once more and we see how a culture that traded its anchor for a mirror it ended up completely adrift. Look at the sociological impact of our modern twenty-four-hour celebrity culture. It used to be that fame, well, that was just a byproduct of achievement. You built a better mousetrap, you wrote a brilliant symphony, or you served your country. Today, fame is achieved by the sheer unadulterated refusal to blush. We have created an entire economy around the shameless celebrity. They break the law, they exploit their families, they broadcast their deepest indelicacies on a glowing screen. And we love it. And the cash registers ring. The sociological impact is devastating. It trickles down from the Hollywood Hills straight into our living rooms. When our young people watch the shameless rewarded with millions of followers and also lucrative endorsement deals, well, the lesson is clear. Dignity, well, that's just a liability. Shock value is the only currency that matters today. We are rapidly trading a society built on mutual respect for a colosseum of constant noisy self-promotion. But now let's look at the other side of this coin. Because when principled, moral shaming gets twisted into a weapon or a weapon against things that people just can't control. It ceases to be a tool for civilization and it becomes a medical hazard. Here's an example. Take the rampert culture of body shaming. Now, when society uses its invisible gavel to mock a person's physical stature, their weight, or their appearance, well it isn't enforcing a moral norm, it is triggering a biological crisis. Did you know that there's clinical research which has blown the whistle on this? Medical studies show that weight stigma and body shaming trigger a massive spike in cortisol. Well, that's the body's primary stress hormone. That chronic stress doesn't motivate people to get healthy. Instead, it drives elevated blood pressure, metabolic disruption, and severe clinical depression. It fuels devastating eating disorders, and it forces people into social isolation. Shaming a man for his character, well that can make him a better neighbor. But shaming a person for their physical frame that just makes them sick. It is a toxic misapplication of a social tool. So how did we get here? How did we lose the ability to know the difference between right and wrong, between principled standards and just plain outright cruelty? Ha ha. Well, for that answer, you have to go back to the 1970s. It was the decade of the me generation, and I was born into it. And it was perfectly encapsulated by a runway pop psychology book titled I'm okay, you're okay. Did I say runway? Runaway pipe pop psychology book. Well, now the book started as a well-meaning therapeutic concept. It really did, but when it hit the broader culture, it mutated into a disastrous sociological construct. It became the ultimate bumper sticker philosophy. And you know I hate bumper sticker philosophies. Whatever I do is fine, and whatever you do is fine, and nobody has the right to judge anyone. Really? Well, that single phrase did more to dismantle the architecture of American accountability than a century of political debates, and some of them were really good debates. It effectively took the teeth out of principled shaming. If a student skipped school, I'm okay, you're okay. If a businessman cheated on his taxes, I'm okay, you're okay. If a parent abandoned their duties, I'm okay, you're okay. By erasing the standard, it took away the healthy, restorative shame that well, it used to call us back to our best selves. It leveled the playing field between virtue and vice, declaring them both well, equally acceptable. The great irony of the I'm okay, you're okay revolution is that it didn't create a kind of world. By destroying the shared moral rules that kept us civil, it left us with a culture where the only standard left is outward acceptance and appearance. We stopped shaming bad behavior and we started shaming bad complexions. We stopped holding people accountable for their choices, and we started mocking them for their limitations. We walked away from the old-fashioned principled standards that kept our communities together, only to find ourselves trapped in a world that is obsessed with the mirror, but completely blind to the soul. You know, we look back at the well-meaning road signs of history, and we often find they were pointing in the exact opposite direction of where we actually ended up. If we look at the ledger once more, and we will see how a generation that tried to engineer happiness in the classroom created a quiet crisis right here in the American home. So we can go to the 1980s. The culture had fully digested the I'm okay, you're okay philosophy of the 1970s, and educators decided it was time to put it finally into practice. Why? They called it the self-esteem movement. Now in classrooms across the entire nation, they stopped handing out red ink. They stopped keeping score in Little League. They gave trophies just for, I don't know, showing up. The theory was simple. If we make children feel unconditionally magnificent about themselves, well then I'm sure they will grow up to conquer the world. But you cannot manufacture esteem out of thin air. No, I'm sorry. You can't. Real self-esteem isn't a sticker that you get for sitting in a chair. It is the quiet satisfaction of overcoming a very difficult obstacle, of mastering a trade, for example, or of failing and having the grit to stand back up. By removing the standard, we didn't lift the children up. We anchored them in a false sense of reality. We told them they were masters of the universe before they ever had learned to turn a wrench or even solve an equation. Their names were the first things they saw as a baby on the wall in their nursery. And when that generation grew up and met the cold hard walls of reality, well, the shockwave rattled the very foundations of our society. Which brings me, well, all of us, I guess, to the current situation. Glaring disparity between males and females in America today. See, when that self-esteem movement hit the modern era, it took a very strange and very specific turn. For the last few decades, our cultural institutions, from the university lecture halls, brilliant, of course, to the television screens, maybe not so brilliant. Well, they all rightly focused on lifting up young women. And by the way, that is a good thing. But in the process, the young men were left entirely out of the equation. In fact, they were given a very different message. The natural traits that have characterized young men since the I don't know, the dawn of time uh competitive drive, physical restlessness, a desire to conquer and protect Well, those were suddenly treated not as energies to be channeled into productive citizenship, but they were treated as a pathology. We called it toxic. We told them that to be good, they needed to sit still, be quiet, and adopt a more passive, t feminine disposition. We ignored the boy who just wanted to build things, and we degraded the man who just wanted to lead. And what are the fruits of this cultural engineering? Let's look at the scoreboard today. For the first time in our history, young men are falling drastically behind. They're dropping out of college at record rates. They are dropping out of the workforce. Millions of them are retreating into the glowing artificial worlds of video games and digital screens because the real world has told them their natural strengths are no longer required. And when you hollow out the confidence and purpose of an entire generation of young men, the family structure collapses. Traditional marriage? Well, those rates have plummeted to historic lows. Why? Because well, a healthy marriage requires two pillars capable of carrying the weight of that roof. When young women look around for a reliable, driven partner to build a life with, they are too often finding young men who have been hollowed out by a culture that told them their masculinity was a flaw. The result? Well, the cribs are empty. The birth rates in America have dropped well below the replacement level. We are seeing fewer children born, fewer households formed, and more individuals growing old in absolute isolation. The great tragedy of the self-esteem movement is that it forgot the most basic law of human nature. You cannot build a strong society by making people feel good about doing nothing. And you certainly cannot build a future by telling half of your population that their natural design Well, that's a mistake. Men and women were never meant to be identical copies of each other. They were meant to be two halves of a grand working puzzle. When we finally remember how to respect the unique principled strengths of both sexes, when we stop trying to make boys into girls and stop well and start helping them become men, well only then are we gonna see the lights turn back on in the American home. Mark my words. You know, we often look at the evening news and we wonder if the old fashioned American spirit has just finally flickered out. We look at the statistics, we look at the empty playgrounds, and we start to worry. But if you want to find the real heart of America, you have to look past the spreadsheets and step right inside a home filled with the sound of heavy footsteps, slamming doors, and the unyielding laughter of four brothers. You need to look at a family born into the storm of the modern era, all of them arriving, by the way, after 1995, and you will see another story, a sunny side of life story. This is for you.

SPEAKER_02 36:20

Being the youngest in a house full of boys is not a spectative sport.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

It is a daily masterclass in survival. By the time the fourth boy arrived, the older three had already carved their names into the local ledger. They had set the bar high in the classrooms, and they had left their sweat and blood on the Friday night gridiron.

SPEAKER_02 36:46

But in 2009, long came colour.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

He developed an advanced vocabulary. It is the twenty comments of the very youngest of the lawyer's time. But then I'm gonna hit the front doors of the modern public education system.

SPEAKER_02 37:38

And that is where the real battle began. Because our schools today are still largely built on a 17th-century factory blueprint. They don't always want leaders. They want compliance.

SPEAKER_01 37:54

They want everyone to stand in a straight line, keep their mouths shut, avoid conflict at all costs, and for the love of God, don't upset the Apple card. For a boy with a quick mind and a fire in his belly. That kind of environment isn't an entertainment.

SPEAKER_03 41:03

Well, we have. We have seen how the pack mentality can turn a good instinct into a wild, destructive fever. But as we stand here looking at the horizon, it is time to bring the wagon back to the center of the road. We need to appreciate shame again in America. It's not as a weapon to destroy. Just cool your jets. But rather as a fence to protect. Somewhere along the way, we bought into this dangerous lie that loving your neighbor means expecting absolutely nothing from them. We somewhere decided that tolerance is the highest virtue, even if it means watching the people we care about slide right off a cliff. Well, that isn't love. No friends, that is neglect. A healthy community, a true American neighborhood, is built on high expectations. We should expect our children to be honest, to work hard, and to respect their elders. We should expect our neighbors to keep their word, to look out for the widow down the street, and to pull their own weight. Because when you lower the bar to the ground, well you're not being kind. You're telling the next generation you're not capable of reaching the top. And for those who follow the good book, well this isn't just a civic duty, it is a Christian responsibility. Galatians tells us plainly that if a brother is overtaken in any trespass, those who are spiritual should restore such a one, not with a club, and not with a self-righteous sneer, but in a spirit of gentleness. We have a holy obligation to alert each other when we have crossed the line. When a young man starts drifting into selfishness, or when a neighbor lets their integrity slip, we don't whisper behind their backs, and we don't join a digital lynch mob to ruin their name. We pull them aside, we look them in the eye, and we deliver the truth, but we deliver it wrapped in love, wrapped in respect, and filled with an unshakable hope for the very best that person has to give. That is where the magic happens. When shame is levied in love, well it doesn't leave a person broken right there in the mud. It acts as a divine rumble strip. A rumble strip on the highway of life. It just wakes you up. It it stings for a moment, yes, but it forces you to turn that steering wheel before you crash right on into the ditch. Think about my son, young Colin, right there on the football field or the baseball field or the basketball court or the golf course, the track. If a coach sees him missing an assignment, the coach doesn't ignore it to save his feelings. He corrects him. That momentary flush of realization, that healthy sense of I am better than this, is what sharpens the blade. It drives the athlete to dig deeper, run faster, and execute the play perfectly the next time around. The great secret of a principled society is that our individual moments of shame are never meant to be the end of the book. No. They are merely the setup for the grand finale. When we have the courage to maintain high standards and the love to hold each other to them, the sting of falling short becomes, well, the fuel for a spectacular comeback. It refines our character, it knits our families tighter together. And together, those right moments of correction don't lead to defeat, they lead a nation straight away to victory. You look at the cold, hard ledger of America today, and you'll find a mathematical tragedy locked away behind gray concrete walls. If we look at the score guard of our penal system and we see, well, we'll see exactly what happens when the fence of the family falls down. Consider the numbers. In the United States today, we are housing a population behind bars that would rival a major metropolis. Around 1.2 million souls are sitting in state and federal prisons. 1.2 million. But let's take a closer look at the math. Over 90% of those inmates are men. Young men, mostly, who should be uh building businesses, coaching literally, or holding a working man's tools in one way or the other. The young women, well, they're there too. And unfortunately, their numbers have been rising dramatically over the last few decades. But if you trace the blueprints of those broken lives backward, you're gonna find a staggering common denominator. Study after study after study will tell you that the overwhelming majority of young people who find themselves in a prison cell, they grew up in a home without a dad. They didn't have that masculine anchor. They didn't have the daily unyielding expectation of a nuclear home. Yes, I said a nuclear home. If we want to mitigate these numbers in the future, we don't need more concrete cells. We need a returned focus to the nuclear family, the original God-given department of corrections and human development. And how do you build a nuclear family that stands, I don't know, like a fortress against the cultural tide? Well, it starts with an old-fashioned written agreement. Let's do a family creed. You and me, let's just do this. It is the visual anchor hanging right there on the living room wall or wherever that tells your children exactly who they are before the world tries to tell them otherwise. And it will. So here are three pillars I'll give you for the modern family creed. The first, the pillar of the name. It goes like this in this house, our name is currency. We tell the truth when it hurts, we keep our promises when it costs us, and we never leave a neighbor in the ditch. Then there's the pillar of the shield. We do not whine, we do not complain, and we do not expect the world to give us a living. We outwork the competition and we take responsibility for our own mistakes. And finally, there's the pillar of the altar. And this cannot be missed. We serve a higher authority. We bend our knees to God so that we can stand tall before any man. Our strength is given to us to protect the weak, not to exploit them. Now, when a young person does cross the line, uh because we all do, how does a strong society handle it? Well, for decades, our courts have used a bureaucratic stamp. You break a law, you pay a fine to the state, or you sit in a warehouse called a jail, with the other lawbreakers. It doesn't work. It doesn't heal the wound, it doesn't correct anything. But there is a better form of corrections gaining ground, and that's rooted in the exact same personal accountability that I've been talking about. They call it restorative justice. See, in a restorative model, the offender doesn't just face a judge in a black robe, he has to look at the person he harmed. He has to sit across a table from the neighbor whose store he broke into, or the family whose peace he completely shattered. He has to hear their pain. And then instead of just sitting idly in a concrete cell, he is given a path to make it right. He must sweat to pay back what he stole. He must work to rebuild what he broke. It replaces the heavy, cheap escape of institutional punishment with the heavy transformative weight of a thing called personal responsibility or personal accountability. It doesn't just punish the criminal. It restores our communities. And for those who think this is some new fangled sociological experiment, well, I encourage you to take a look at the old ancient blueprint called the Bible, which has been preaching this exact balance of personal accountability and social responsibility since the beginning. Consider three study points for the kitchen table tonight. Ezekiel 18 20. The scripture says plainly, oh, and I put it into song for you.

SPEAKER_04 51:59

The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. You cannot blame your environment. You cannot blame your upbringing, and you cannot blame society.

SPEAKER_03 52:51

Did you like that? Well, there's also Galatians six two and six five. This is the divine paradox of social responsibility. Verse two tells us to bear one another's burdens, meaning we have a duty to help a neighbor who is genuinely crushed under the weight of life. But then just three verses later, in six five, verse five says, For each one shall bear his own load. It means you carry your own backpack. Yes, we help the helpless. But we expect every able bodied citizen to pull their own weight. And then there's Luke 19 8. So that's the study of Zacchaeus, the corrupt tax collector. When he had his come to Jesus, literally his come to Jesus moment, he didn't just say that he was sore, he stood up and said, If I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I will restore it fourfold. That is the biblical definition of restorative justice. True repentance, well, it has a price tag. It requires looking the victim right there in the eye and making them whole. Now we can spend, or we can keep on spending, billions of dollars building bigger prisons and bigger government, or we can start doing the hard work of building stronger families, stronger homes. When we give our young men a creed to live by, a family to answer to, and a community that holds them to a high standard in love, we find that the human heart doesn't want to just break the law anymore. What it wants to do is fulfill its purpose. That cell door only locks from the outside when the front door of the home failed to teach the rules from the inside. You know, we live in a world that is obsessed with the temporary. We buy things made of plastic that crack before the year is out. We scroll through messages that disappear in the blink of an eye. But there are still a few things meant to endure. There are still a few things designed to be handed down from a father to a son, and to a grandson after him. Etc. etc. And that brings us to the smell of fresh-cut Iowa black walnut and our small outfit up in the country, right here called the Sunnyside Farms Woodmill. Now, we here at Sunnyside don't just harvest timber. We understand that a home, well, it needs an anchor. And we know that before a boy can grow into a man of a foundation of any kind, he needs to know exactly what the family name stands for. So we have taken the finest, tight-grained, beautiful American black walnut, the kind that survives winters and outlasts storms. Heck, they make they make guns out of it. And we've created something magnificent for your living room wall. It is a solid, deeply engraved wooden plaque. And at the very top, carved in bold, unyielding letters, is your family name. And right beneath that name, at So Deep You Can Run Your Fingers Across the Truth of it. Well, there are three pillars, those three pillars we talked about, the modern family creed. And when you look at the sunny side plaque every morning before you walk out the front door, you and your children will read the blueprints of your household. First, in this house, our name is our currency. We tell the truth when it hurts. We keep our promises when it costs us. And we never leave a neighbor in the ditch. Second, we do not whine, we do not complain, and we do not expect the world to give us a living. We outwork the competition and we take responsibility for our mistake. And third, we serve a higher authority. We bend our knees to God so that we can stand tall before any man. Our strength is given to us to protect the weak, not to exploit them. You can leave your children some money, and I'm sure that the banks can take it all. You can leave them a house if you want to, but the market will probably change. But when you leave them a standard carved into the very heart of American wood, well, you're leaving and giving them a compass that won't ever lie to them. Here at Sunnyside, I select each piece of wood by hand. No two are exactly alike. Well, that's because no two families are exactly alike. They're heavy. It smells of walnut, which is unique. And it is built to outlive the television set. Just all you gotta do is email us today using the address Ms. Jonah. Tell me what you want. For your name carved into the sunny side black walnut plaque. Give your sons and daughters a wall they can lean on when the rest of the world starts to shake. For $50, free shipping. You can't go wrong. Thanks, by the way, in advance for your order. You know, we live in an age where the speed of sound has been replaced by the speed of a fiber optic cable. We have built a world where a man can sit in his living room in his undershirt, type a few words on a glowing screen, and send a lightning bolt halfway across the globe. But as we look at our phones in the digital age, we see a terrifying new trend, and what we see is an entire generation that has delivered, well, discovered, I guess, the immense power of the whip, but completely forgotten why we use it in the first place. We return to the absence of true, principled shame in our social media generation, the now, or more accurately, the perversion of it. You see, the traditional shame, the kind we practice on the front porch and in the local church, always had a specific target. It was delivered by people who knew your name, who looked you in the eye, and who wanted you to fix your mistake so you could sit back down at the table. But today, oh, today we have the keyboard warrior. Now these well these are the digital executioners who roam the plains of the internet looking for anyone who steps an inch outside the modern consensus, whatever that is. They do not know the person they are attacking. They do not know their family, their burdens, or their heart. They only know that a rule, whatever rule that was, was broken. And the digital pack wants blood. And they attempt to impose shame with absolutely no reverence for its ultimate payout, which is supposed to be correction and forgiveness forgiveness. Now look at the examples cluttering our daily feeds, for example. Take the case of the local business owner who makes an insensitive comment or an honest, clumsy mistake on a video clip. Well, within an hour the video keyboard warriors descend. They don't call him up. They don't walk into his shop to explain why the words hurt them. Instead, they flood his business page with thousands of one star reviews. They call his suppliers, they hound his employees. They don't want him to apologize for crying out loud. They want him bankrupt. Or consider the high school athlete. He's just a kid finding his footy in the world. Maybe he or she uses a foolish, offensive word in a private text message that leaks to the public square. In the old days, his dad, his coach, and his pastor probably would have pulled him into a room, delivered a blistering lesson in accountability, and made him sweat to earn back the town's trust. But today? Well, the internet demands that he be stripped of his scholarship, expelled from his school, and erased from the record forever. These people today, they build the digital stocks, but they never let the prisoner out. And that is the great tragedy of the social media generation. It is a system of just total judgment with zero redemption. When a keyboard warrior launches a public shaming campaign, there's no off ramp. If the accused apologizes, the internet the internet calls it hollow. If they stay quiet, the internet calls it defiance. There is no mechanism for penance, no path for restitution, and absolutely no room for forgiveness. It is shame used not as a medicine to heal a neighbor, but as a toxic waste to permanently poison the ground they walk on. The great irony of the digital mob is that while they are obsessed with shaming others, they themselves, well, they're completely shameless. Protected by the anonymity of a screen and a fake username, the keyboard warrior can destroy a life before lunch and never feel a single pang of guilt about the wreckage they left behind. They've taken a delicate, sacred tool of human civilization, the moral boundary, and turned it into a video game, where the only goal is to rack up a high score of human misery. When we strip forgiveness out of the equation, shame ceases to be the immune system of our society and it becomes the cancer. We must, we have to, we've got to turn off the noise, look past the screens, and remember how to handle our disagreements face to face with the high standards well that keep us honest. And the grace that keeps us human. You know, over the years, I have been, well, deeply inclined to take a heavy dose of umbrage with those men and women who have blatantly and completely without merit, attempted to employ the delicate tool of shame. Now, whether it is done by the cheap fence line chatter between dubious neighbors or behind the absolute safety of keyboard anonymity, I have chafed and I have burned at their indiscretions. Now, my quarter century of United States Army training has given me a very specific set of instincts. It has made me wish more than a few times that I could just march right up to their front steps, knock on their doors, and drag them out from behind those precious glowing screens. I've wanted to confront them in the most inconvenient, the most unconf the uncomfortable and the most fiercely public venues imaginable. I've wanted to hoist them up by their very toes or slap them Russian style right off their comfortable bar stools. Why? Well, because I am absolutely certain that those cowards never had the advantage of a mother like mine, a mother standing in the kitchen wagging a finger and reminding me that someday, somewhere, someone was going to completely clean my clock from my smart mouth. I've always curdled at the presence of bullies. And make no mistake, the bullies today are many. And they are most often hiding in the dark behind a digital wall. I've never shied away from a fight for the underdog. Oh, not once. And it pains me to my very core to watch good friends and decent friends. Family members fall victim to the jagged stones thrown by cowards trying to shame people who won't even show their own faces. But I have not tracked these dogs down. And I have not caught them in my grip. Ooh, but if I did. And it is not because I fear losing the physical fight, believe me. No it's not that. A soldier doesn't fear the scuffle. I have stayed my hand because I fear losing the point. You see, I still believe shame matters. It is a tool that's just too important to be abandoned to the mob. The mob. And perhaps j just perhaps, it is via the medicine of true principled shame that we can finally curb the cowardly nature of those very people who demand total accountability from the world with absolutely no respect for the accountability of themselves. We don't need to break bones, although it is appealing. We need to break their illusion of righteousness. We need to hold up a mirror so bright and so unyielding that the keyboard warrior is forced to look at his own reflection, disgusting as it may be, blush for the first time in his or her life, and finally step back into the light of just decent civilization. The greatest victory over a bully isn't proving you can hit harder than they can, it is proving that your standards are too high to be brought down to their level. When we refuse to join their mudslinging, but refuse to let them change our values, well their whole coward's wall crumbles all on its own. You know, we have covered a ton of miles today. We've looked at the jagged rocks of history from the dark woods of Salem to the blacklists of Washington, all the way to the endless, noisy static of the modern digital screen, which we just talked about. We've looked at a culture that first turned shame into a blind and wild frenzy, and then in its confusion tried to cure the disease by throwing out the medicine altogether. We look at the ledger one final time today and we see the grand sum of our math. We have learned that when you try to engineer a society where nobody ever blushes, where every standard is leveled, and where the bumper sticker rule of I'm okay, you're okay rules the schoolhouse, well, you don't get a kinder word, you get a house with no walls. You get an entire generation of young men and women drifting without a compass, falling behind in the workforce and losing the confidence to build traditional homes and fill the cribs of tomorrow. And yet, when the reaction to that chaos is a digital lynch mob, keyboard warriors throwing stones from behind a wall of anonymity, with no desire for correction and absolutely zero room for forgiveness, you don't get justice. You just get more wreckage. So what's the answer? What is the architecture that keeps a civilization standing when the wind starts to howl? Well, I think the answer is simple. Though it requires a heavy dose of old fashioned grit. A little bit of balanced and virtuous shame is not the problem with society. I think it is the solution. It is the divine rumble strip on the highway of life. It isn't meant to run you off the road, it is meant to wake you up so you can turn the steering wheel, ding dong. But it cannot be delivered by just some anonymous mob, and it cannot be driven by malice. The blueprint is a principled one-on-one engagement. It is the high expectation we hold for our children, our athletes, like my son Colin, and our neighbors. It is the soldier's instinct to stand tall for the underdog, combined with the discipline to keep the standard high. And this isn't a modern sociological experiment. This is a biblical demand. It is the holy obligation to pull a brother aside in a spirit of gentleness, to look them in the eye, and to deliver the truth wrapped in love and respect. It is the restorative justice that demands a man face the neighbor he wronged, take personal accountability for his actions, and sweat to make it right. When a family plants its roots deep, carving its values into the solid, unyielding grain of a live edge black walnut plaque on the living room wall, that home then becomes, I think, a fortress. It teaches the rules from the inside so the world doesn't have to lock the doors from the outside. And that is the real secret. The secret of this journey that we call citizenship. True. Healthy correction isn't about beating a man down. It is about reminding him of who he is supposed to be. It is about having enough hope in his potential that you refuse to let him settle for his worst instincts, which are many. So don't shy away from the high standards. Don't be afraid to hold the line for the people you truly care about, because when you deliver that honest, loving correction at the exact moment it is needed most, you just might find that sometimes a little bit of healthy, principled shaming can result in you being the sunny side of someone else's life.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:28

When the shadows fall and doubts begin to creep, remember together we're strong every week. Lift your neighbor up with kindness every day. Let your actions speak the words you want to say.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:45

The sunny side of life is a weekly production about our life on the family farmstead here in Iowa, the liberties we prize, and the pursuits which make us happy. None of this is possible, of course, without Christ in our lives. For the Lord God is our stomach and our shield.