“Character Is Destiny” by Al Sikes

My Dad was a retailer in a small town in Southeast Missouri. Name: Kendall Sikes. In my youth, Dad and his brother had a store that, among other things, sold toys. In our family, Christmas was a really big deal—earthly and beyond.

Beyond the transcendent part, our Church was important. Mom, Marcia Sikes, was the organist at the Church, and I heard Christmas songs being practiced by her every day for well over a month. The melodies were layered with lyrics of love, joy, kindness—the fruit of the faith.

Back then, there were radio stations that broadcast church services on Sunday morning and then reverted to regular programming by the afternoon. During the holidays, regular programming often meant Christmas music, and quite a bit of it recalled biblical stories related musically. The song, “Mama Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” was still decades off.

My job at the store included re-shelfing. Dad knew most of the customers and if, for one reason or another, they had to return items, he accepted them and I put them back on the shelf. It was, he said, “the right thing to do.” Those little episodes of life linger.

We are now in what the Christian faith calls the Advent Season; the dawn before the sun comes up, as I think about it. The staging before the main event, the birth of a baby, the world calls Jesus.

But the main Christmas event now, for most, is a variation on Kings (wise men from the East) bringing gifts to celebrate Jesus’s birth.  Gift buying and giving are the propulsive features of the season.

And gift giving, I know from my broadcast days, results in peak advertising in the fourth quarter. A recent report found a 20% quarter-over-quarter increase in overall digital advertising in the fourth quarter of 2024.

Today a popular social media descriptive is “Influencer”. Merriam-Webster defines an influencer as: “one who exerts influence: a person who inspires or guides the actions of others.” And that is just the way people in the media business, old and new, see themselves—especially in podcasting and social media.

Media salespeople, a part of the mix, are “influence advocates”. They talk in impressions per thousand of people reached. They can tell you about repetition, specifically, how many impressions each person will hear or see. Somewhere along this line of ad creation, volume, and repetition, companies, agencies, and media prevail. Compromised on a societal level are the transcendent messages of “love, joy and kindness.”

We, the collective, are coming around. Social media is providing searing lessons. Many schools, for example, are taking cell phones away as classes begin. There is, at least I hope, a 21st Century understanding that turning kids over to various media, social and legacy alike, is harmful. While this has always been true, we are now in an age when performative outrage used to break through media noise compounds the problem.

But back to lessons and going outside the family. The Pledge of Allegiance, with its transcendent message, for example, is absent in many schools today. A 1943 Supreme Court ruling said that requiring students to recite the Pledge violated their First Amendment rights.

It is, of course, impossible for me to know what ultimate effect my Mom’s rendition of sacred holiday music had on my young mind and its lingering effects. But it was not nothing, and society’s swing to intense consumerism and, more recently, increased creative noise and profanity is also not nothing. When the prevailing culture finds God an irrelevance, the Judeo-Christian moral codes follow.

It is easy to blame parents or schools or politics for societal breakdown. Let me add to the list—not at the adornment level, but at the foundation one—when the profane transcends the sacred, trouble is the offspring.

Thank you, Mom and Dad.

Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al writes on themes from his book, Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books.