By Carl Sampson
I was thinking about the Ten Commandments the other day.
It’s not that I’m super religious or anything, but when you get older you start trying to put two and two together.
Those commandments are as old as the hills and twice as dusty, but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored.
And really, how many of the Ten Commandments do you see broken in any given day?
All you have to do is watch a typical television show or movie and every one of them is shredded.
Think about it. Adultery: check. Killing: check. Lying: check. Using the Lord’s name in vain: double check.
Not a single commandment is followed.
Add the general crudeness and stupidity of a typical TV show or movie and you have a perfect argument that our culture is circling the drain.
Maybe the problem with the Ten Commandments is there are too many of them.
With our society’s short attention span these days, five commandments are as many as folks can handle.
So without further ado, I will attempt to come up with a shorter version that is hip, kind of like me.
I just call it The Big 5.
No. 1: Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want to read on the front page of the newspaper or Facebook. That covers a lot of ground. I mean, think of all the totally crazy and out-of-control stuff you see on the front page of the newspaper. And I’m just talking about Congress and the president. If they took the time to consider how that nonsense would reflect on them, maybe they wouldn’t have done it.
No. 2: Never leave your wingman. All right, I borrowed this from that religious and inspirational film, Top Gun. That’s when Maverick discovers that fighter pilots never leave their wingman in combat. In our daily lives our “wingmen” are our husbands and wives. We need to back them up, and they need to back us up. All the time.
No. 3: Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see. I used to think this applied mainly to politics but these days I hear so much junk that couldn’t be true that I just turn off my ears. It’s not worth listening to.
No. 4: Watch your mouth. When I was a teenager, my mom told me that about every 10 seconds. I was one of those kids that had a smart-aleck response for everyone and everything. Nowadays, I understand what my mom was getting at. What I say reflects more on me than on whatever I might be talking about.
No. 5: Question yourself. So often we question what other people are doing but we don’t look in the mirror and ask two tough questions: What am I doing, and why am I doing it? If don’t have really good answers to both questions, I change.
So there you have it. The Big 5 may be only half as many, but they’re also half as good
