Virtue and Vice

This is a police sketch of a man San Jose police are looking for in yesterday's kidnapping and sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl who was walking home from school

I'm not trying to be an alarmist here, but this news story (from my hometown) is just nuts. This is the story.

They were walking home when a man in a large white car motioned for the young sisters to cross the street in a quiet San Jose neighborhood just off Almaden Expressway.

The 9-year-old crossed first. Her 12-year-old sister went next. Suddenly, police said, the driver gunned the engine and drove into the older girl, catapulting her onto the hood before she tumbled into the street.

Her younger sister helped her to the curb as the car sped away. But the terrifying ordeal wasn't over. The big white car turned around and came back, the girls told police. The driver forced the older girl into his car, drove off and then later tried to sexually assault her in what police describe as the city's most brazen kidnapping in recent memory.

Tuesday, the severely injured 12-year-old victim remained in the hospital and San Jose police released more chilling details as they urgently asked for the public's help to find the attacker they say is ruthless enough to run down and abduct a child in broad daylight in front of witnesses.

So that's just unnerving. But it's not the only story.

• There's this one from CNN about a guy who kidnapped a young boy.
  
• And then there's this story about a sex-trade ring that was broken up in the Bay Area this past July.
  
• And there's a new movie out called "Trade"- a movie about trade in human beings; in this case, a 13-year-old Mexican girl who is kidnapped and brought to New Jersey, where her virginity will be auctioned on the Internet for an expected $50,000. Chillingly, the movie is based on fact, on an article by Peter Landesman in the New York Times Magazine. And it's not an isolated case.

Now, this is not a story about sex, I don't think. I think it goes deeper than that.

Here is something of which I am convinced:
Virtues strengthen with practice.

Virtue is a muscle that grows with exercise. There have been times in my life when I have not felt much like being good, or doing the right thing, but I have done it anyway (for whatever reason). And even though my heart was not in the right place, I have found at the end of "acting" good, I have felt better. And then my heart came around. This is the secret of virtue - that practice makes it easier. The more I have worked to be honest in my communications, the easier it becomes.

Here is something else of which I am convinced:
Vice operates just like virtue.

Practice vice, and you will find the easier it will become to give in to that same vice later. This is why one beer leads to two, which leads to five, which leads to hard liquor.

Which leads me to my central point. The internet has made it exceptionally easy for men (and women, I suppose) to give in to the vice of lust. It used to be that for a man to indulge his darker sexual urges, he had to go downtown to some seedy bookstore. That in itself prevented most men, if by nothing more than the fear of "What if someone sees me."

Now, pornography streams onto your computer in your home anonymously FOR FREE.

Secondly, the very nature of pornography has changed in my lifetime. When I was a boy, my classmates might sneak a picture from a magazine they found in their father's closet. There is a profound difference between a picture of a naked woman and video of two people engaged in explicit sexual acts. It's the difference between throwing a bullet and shooting it.

And here is my point: if a person engages in pornography, it will become increasingly easier and easier for them to act on all their sexual urges. And those urges will grow because it is simply not possible for people to satisfy their sexual appetites with anonymous, impersonal sex. We were not made that way, for that reason.

In the words of C.S. Lewis:

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, 'If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing.' I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.

So as long as we have a society that encourages people to run, head-first into vice, we will have a society of people who increasingly learn to act on that vice. And without restraint, vice will overtake you.