Private Choices
Where Miscellaneous Items End Up!
Private Choices Need To Be Made Carefully!
James E. Faust made some amazing observations about private choices.
Adults need to understand, and our children should be taught, that private choices
are not private; they all have public consequences.
There is a popular notion that doing our own thing or doing what feels good is our
own business and affects no one but us. The deadly scourges that are epidemic
all over the world have flourished in the context of this popular notion.
But this is simply not true.
All immoral behavior directly impacts society. Even innocent people are affected.
Drug and alcohol abuse have public consequences, as do illegitimacy, pornography,
and obscenity.
The public cost in human life and tax dollars for these so-called
private choices is enormous: poverty, crime, a less-educated work force, and mounting
demands for government spending to fix problems that cannot be fixed by money.
It simply is not true that our private conduct is our own business. Our
society is the sum total of what millions of individuals do in their private lives.
That sum total of private behavior has worldwide public consequences of enormous
magnitude.
There are no completely private choices.
("Will I Be Happy?", _Ensign_, May 1987, p. 80)
Choices
Choice Quotes
- The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. - Georget Elliot
- Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday. - John Wayne