It's time the Church stopped bemoaning the constantly shrinking attention span of the younger generation and started thanking God for MTV and the power of boredom. Because in this instance, what's being transmitted by electrons at the speed of light is in agreement with ancient truths carved in stone.
     Let's begin with a little literary-historical criticism.
     Greeks in the 8th century B.C. sat for endless hours, maybe even days, as they listened to Homer or his fellow poets recite long passages of "The Iliad" from memory, with only the poet's gestures and facial expressions as a visual clue to the story-line. You could nod off at the beginning of a description of "rosy-fingered dawn" breaking over the Trojan sky, and wake up, refreshed, to catch the end of the same description still being recited. This was how the Greeks entertained themselves back then. Go figure.
     Homer's second production, "The Odyssey," was more fast-paced, with shorter scenes, more action and fewer opportunities for bathroom breaks. But it still took days to recite.
     Somehow – if you believe the Apostle Paul – those Greeks got it all screwed up, even with their long attention spans. They created great philosophy, art, culture and politics that indeed influenced later history, but it brought them no closer to God than the most distracted sociopath, crack-smoking inner-city third-grade dropout who spends all day playing WWF Smackdown on a stolen Playstation.
     Now fast forward to the year 1999.
     (And understand that "fast forward" is a term that became widely used only when everyone had a cassette tape recorder. When we all switch from videotapes to DVD players, the term will again become meaningless.)
     The much-maligned Generation-Xers and their younger siblings, the Millennials, are so bored with our culture that they require a steady stream of freshly changing options coming at them down a broadband Internet backbone at 700 kbps – usually while they're watching music videos on cable at the same time – just to stay sane.
     The older, more responsible elements of society are alarmed at this, even though they started the modern escalation of the pace of change with the TV sitcoms and advertising blitzes of the 1950's and '60's.
     The detached indifference, ennui and general insouciance (go look it up, if you can focus for that long) of tomorrow's leaders is approaching the state of a famous wise man of the 10th century B.C. who said, "vanities, all is vanity."
     And that's good.
     (Actually, the ability to "focus" isn't all it's cracked up to be. You want intensity of focus? Look at the Unabomber.)
     All human effort, no matter how noble, only produces emptiness and futility. The prophet Isaiah said, "All flesh is as grass, and all the good thereof is as the flower of the field." That is the real meaning of vanity.
     And it is becoming more evident every day. In my lifetime, the way movies are made has changed drastically. In the 1940's and '50's, a visual would last three or four minutes. In the late '60's, when I was involved in movie production, the rule of thumb was that a shot could last 30 seconds at the most. Today, visuals in the most successful movies, especially those aimed at a young audience, last only three or four seconds. Music videos have few shots that last more than half a second.
     Music patterns have followed a similar progression. When I was young, a hit song was popular for several years. Now, if a song is on Billboard's Top Ten for a week, it is a smash hit. If it's a few months old, it's a golden oldie.
     This media bombardment has conditioned the next generation to discard things rather than fix them, to distrust each choice that presents itself because there are just so many of them, to dismiss civilization with the blanket statement from Beavis and Butt-Head: "Life sucks."
     Media immersion in political scandals had caused these kids to reject the righteous causes of their '60's-era parents. The ease of world travel and the ability to click through web cams showing real-time images of Moscow or Hong Kong or even the north face of Mt. Everest – live – means far-away places can't cure their boredom either.
     Tom Beaudoin, a Generation-Xer and a Door Subscriber, says in his book Virtual Faith (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco) that his generation has experienced "...a withering dissolution of their well-being: broken families, teen pregnancy, unstable sexual identities, physical and emotional abuse, drug addiction, alienation from family, alcoholism, disrespect for authority, short attention spans, and overall bouts of nihilism."
     But the little secret they share is that their attention spans aren't really impaired – at least the ones who aren't suffering from A.D.D., and haven't been brain-damaged by drugs. You can see them practicing guitar all day long, or perfecting a skateboard trick for hours. They are simply bored with the things their elders and society are telling them they should give importance to.
     The pace of MTV and video games gives them the opportunity to be exposed to, try out and reject more idolatry than any generation in history.
     Will they do it? That depends partly on us. I know a lot about boredom. I could never tolerate it in my youth, but every time I felt it, I looked around for more exotic locales, more dangerous activities or more debauched behavior to provide an escape. In each instance, it was God calling to me, but I refused to listen. Because I had to seek out those options, it took me years and several trips around the world to reach the end of myself.
     Today, teenagers are assaulted by stimuli, and they run through more options in a month than Homer did in a lifetime. It's possible for them to reach the end of themselves quickly.
     The Church, for the most part, responds by trying to turn back the clock, restore "family values" or legislate some kind of defense against this onslaught of change.
     But what if Jesus really is Lord? What if He really is in control, even of this cascading, exponentially expanding liquid flux?
     And what if our children look up one day from their video games with the wisdom of the eyes of Solomon and see straight through us and every value system we've tried to foist on them, and tell us, "All is vanity and vexation of spirit, and there is no profit under the sun"?
     I'm praying it will happen.
     And that's why I want my MTV.