Monday, March 29, 2004

Putting bumpers on a playpen world

Some more parents under the mistaken belief that because they have children, the rest of the world needs to come to a grinding halt to accomodate them. I liken people who think the rest of the world needs to change their tastes to suit 4 year olds to people who think that if they are married, then it's the rest of the world's responsibility to refrain from having sex with their spouses. They are completely backwards in assigning responsibility. If your spouse cheats on you, then it's your spouse who has fallen down on the marriage vows. If your kids are watching stuff that you don't want them to see, it's not my fault for wanting to watch that stuff nor is it the fault of the the creators for making money by providing it to me. If I wanted responsiblity for raising your damn kids, then I would have had kids myself.
I like this quote alot:

Exasperation is widespread, but so is acknowledgment that the problem defies simple remedies such as fines or new filtering technology.

Well, duh. People keep piling on new and improved ways to keep kids from hearing bad words on TV while blatantly ignoring the low-tech, simple option of turning it off if it offends you.
The sad thing about this is that censorship allows politicians an easy way to address people's family frustrations while avoiding the more complex issues that truly do have a negative affect on family, things like insufficient child care and education resources, an economy that is so wretched that it's becoming close to impossible to raise a family with even two incomes, and poor city planning that is causing communities to become even more unfriendly and disconnected. I know that it's hard to work all day and come home and do housework with kids under your feet, and since people don't feel safe kicking their kids outside to play anymore they instead park them in front of the screen to keep them occupied. Well, turning the television to 24 hours a day of Sesame Street isn't going to help anything--you're still overworked and your kids are still under-stimulated and getting fat and stupid. Better parks and schools and extra-curricular activities would be a good first step. Once my family moved to a small town, we barely watched TV at all because we were too busy with hanging out in the park and our extra-curricular activities.
Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what dire things will befall children if they hear an occassional naughty word or reference to a sex act. When I was in junior high school, there were numerous occassions when I flipped on the TV when a friend was over to visit and some gross pornography would pop up on the screen, because my stepdad had forgotten to change the channel. (And yes, I mean real, full-on porn. We had a satellite dish.) Mostly we'd scream, "Gross!" and change the channel. I think maybe once for like 2 minutes we actually watched out of curiousity. I don't think we were scarred for life or anything. I may not be the best example, but my friend who was generally the unfortunate one with me is married and quite normal, I assure you.

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