Why Kids Should Watch South Park

Parents always cry foul when there is a TV show on the air that they claim will "corrupt" their kids and teach them inappropriate behavior. Why though, do those shows have that effect on their kids? If it so easy for those shows to influence their kids, doesn't it mean that their parents haven't done a good enough job showing their kids what's right and wrong?

One such show that has received that kind of criticism is South Park. The show is about four kids, who live in a town in Colorado named South Park. One of the things that get the show criticized is that the main characters use heavy amounts of foul language. One of the characters that are very intolerant and rude, Eric Cartman, is often the antagonist of the episode, and causes trouble for the whole town, though the other three kids consider him a "friend" when he is not causing problems. Of the many troubles he has caused is launching a hate campaign against "gingers," kids with red hair and freckles. In the episode, he makes outrageous claims that "gingers" do not have souls and are evil, and convinces his classmates to discriminate heavily against them, banning them from the cafeteria and making their lives miserable.

At the climax of the episode, the boy gets his hair dyed red and his skin bleached by his "friends." His life becomes miserable when the people he rallied against "gingers" begin to discriminate against him. Instead of trying to remedy his mistake, he proceeds to rally the "gingers" against "normal" kids, and before dunking one of his "friends" in a pot of lava, he is told that his hair was dyed and that he is not actually a ginger. He then uses his manipulative abilities to convince the "gingers" not to take any action after all.

That episode aired a while ago, and about last week, I saw on the news that kids with red hair were being attacked at schools, and they aired clips of that episode I just discussed. It appeared to me that they were saying that the episode has encouraged kids to attack those red haired kids.

So an old question came to my mind, "Why is the show being blamed, and not the parents that did not raise their children not to act in such a manner?"

Then I thought of how offensive that character, Cartman, is. His frequent intolerant actions against "gingers," hippies, Jewish people, and other various ethnicities, cultures and groups, usually offend his fellow classmates and "friends." Though his antics are usually considered extreme by real people, the message of his actions are the same, they show intolerance and racism to an extreme level.

Why though, can't people take this kid, a cartoon, as intolerant as his is and use him as an example to kids as how not to behave, since at the end of the episode, he gets in trouble in some way. The show as a whole usually focuses on some intolerant or extreme behavior in society, and radical consequences at the end of the episode for the people involved. I think that if parents raise their children with the right morals, their kids can watch that show and take the lessons from it.

I am 19 years old, and maybe it's just that I'm old enough to know the difference between right and wrong, but when I watch this show, I see the lesson implied in the show, and I can actually learn something from an episode once in a while, though I don't really feel that I would ever do anything intolerant, so I don't need to be taught any lessons.

In conclusion, I think that with the right guidance, a kid can watch these offensive TV shows and play video games and not be affected negatively. Parents love blaming everything and everyone but themselves when something goes wrong with their kid, and that has partially contributed to the growing lack of responsibility among kids and parents in society.