“I don’t have time for these clowns. I don’t have time for their judgement and their stupidity. They lay down with their ugly wives in front of their ugly children and just look at their loser lives and then look at me and they say ‘I can’t process it’. Well no, and you never will. Stop trying, just sit back and enjoy the show.” (Charlie Sheen, 24 February 2011)
Decades ago, my father learned that one of his employees was about to have an extramarital affair. Dad tried to dissuade the man by telling him that not only would he lose his marriage and two sons, he’d also lose the integrity necessary to do business. “If you can’t be faithful in your marriage, why would your clients trust you to be faithful with their investment portfolios?” The man ignored my father’s advice and ultimately lost everything, even his self-respect. He became a loser in every sense of the word.
I don’t know why he didn’t listen to reason. Maybe he felt entitled to betray his wife and kids and throw his life away as though no one else had any stake in the matter. Charlie Sheen certainly seems to have felt that way: He has five children and three ex-wives. Shortly after uttering the quote above, Sheen lost his job and acquired the HIV virus. His life is an absolute dumpster fire, and he has no one to blame but himself–although judging by recent retrospective quotes, he’s even now unwilling to take any responsibility for his actions.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately as a new hashtag is trending on Twitter: #pervnado. Urban Dictionary defines “pervnado” as “The seemingly endless number of sexual harassment allegations against politicians and media personalities.” Since a lot of these personalities have in the recent past assumed an unwarranted posture of moral superiority and self-aggrandizement, I’m sorely tempted to savor the poetic justice of their lives blowing away like dust. But that would be wrong because it’s not just their lives, but also the lives of their spouses and children and close friends, that are being affected as well. And it’s also dishonest for me to pretend that we all don’t struggle with some form of lust. Maybe it’s not sexual lust; it could be lust for financial security or knowledge or the perfect job, or even something as mundane as another piece of pumpkin pie. The bad news is that we’re all flawed and can’t justifiably point the finger of condemnation, no matter how much we’d like to.
The good news is that there is an antidote to lust: gratitude. When we learn to be thankful for what we have and stop focusing on what we don’t have, we can actually find satisfaction because our lustful hearts can find rest. This is why Thanksgiving is an essential holiday, especially now. Instead of obsessing over what we want, we can hold on to something we need, which is a grateful heart. As Michael Ramsden says in the following video, “In life, we’re not made happy by what we acquire, but by what we appreciate …. But if you ask me, the problem we have today is not that we have nothing to be grateful for; rather we feel there is no one to be grateful to.”