The World is Going Down the Toilet

Without trying too hard, I can remember my father's booming voice proclaiming that the world was "going down the toilet". This was decades ago but now, more and more, I find myself agreeing with him in principle, if not in fact. "Going down the toilet" to him meant the increasingly widespread use of drugs, crooked politicians, shameless promiscuity, never-ending war, famine, etcetera. To me it's the evident disregard by people (in this country, anyway) of other people's rights and feelings - "man's inhumanity to man", if you will. If you're over a certain age, you understand this. It you're under a certain age, you're probably not even reading this.

I'm not talking about someone's right to free speech or their right to practice whatever religion they deem worthy. I'm not talking about invading sovereign nations (right or wrong). I'm talking about our day-to-day treatment of each other right here at home. You don't see it as much in the older generation - generally speaking, most folks over fifty-something have a pretty good grip on how to properly treat others - which, simply, is just how they themselves want to be treated. It's the (typically younger) self-serving people, these walking "special-interest groups" who were brought up to believe that they are someone *special*, their feelings are somehow more valid than other people's, and the world owes them something. To those people, if they're actually reading this, "You are no more special than anyone else, EVERYONE has feelings just like you and no one, not the world, not your boss, not your parents, owes you a thing". Does upbringing turn this issue into being the parents' fault? No, it doesn't TURN it into the parents' fault - it has ALWAYS been the parents' fault. It doesn't take a village to raise a child, just good parents. And it certainly doesn't take a TV.

Many children in the past 30-40 years have been brought up by their parent's television. As time went on, this box gave us more and more of the world in all its glory and worse, all it's horror. And since horror sells better than glory, it's not hard to guess which one kids were exposed to more. Can you say "desensitization"? If you don't believe that being repeatedly assaulted by graphic violent images will eventually wear down whatever mental defenses you might have, just try to remember how you felt seeing your first horror movie and how you feel now when you see much worse. I'm betting the emotion is not nearly as visceral now even though the images most certainly are. This is because the more we see something, the more often we experience the same thing, the less it seems to affect us or the more "used to it" we become. After decades of seeing nearly everyone on the planet in every country treating their fellow human beings with such disregard, we start to become immune and we even start to treat others without much thought to the fact that they really do have feelings, just like we do. It's almost like a reversion to the schoolyard - to a time when you didn't think to care that little Billy has feelings. That's an understandably closed-minded view if you're only ten years old, but I'm witnessing the same behavior in thirty and forty year-olds who should know by now that in order to "get along" we must be tolerant of other people's shortcomings and idiosyncrasies.

Am I blaming television? No. Video games? No. Bad parenting? There is no easy answer, but looking to the parents is a great place to start. We are a lazy society and parents make up a huge part of that society. Lazy parents breed lazy children and lazy children grow up to be lazy parents who wind up using their TV as a babysitter. This, in turn, teaches our children lessons that they really shouldn't be learning; at least not without a parent there to answer questions or make hard decisions about what this child should be exposed to. We've gotten away from many of the values that we as Americans have prided ourselves on for so long and while it's hard not to see TV as a central part of the problem, parents (the non-lazy ones, anyway) have the final say - the responsibility must be laid at their feet. If the next generation of parents don't start to step-up, I'm afraid Dad might be right.