|
Peggy Noonan: We're Scaring Our Children to Death
For 50 years in America, whenever the subject has turned to what our culture presents, the bright response has been, "You don't like it? Change the channel." But there is no other channel to change to, no safe place to click to. Our culture is national. The terrorizing of children is all over.Click. Smug and menacing rappers. Click. "This is Bauer. He's got a nuke and he's going to take out Los Angeles." Click. Rosie grabs her crotch. "Eat this." Ick. Click. "Every day 2,000 children are reported missing . . ." Click. Don Imus's face. Quick, go back to Rosie! Click. "Eyewitnesses say the shooter then lined the students up . . ." Click. An antismoking campaign on local New York television. A man growls out how he felt when they found his cancer. He removes a bib and shows us the rough red hole in his throat. He holds a microphone to it to deliver his message. Don't smoke, he says. This is what TV will be like in Purgatory. . . . Children are both brave and fearful. They'll walk up to a stranger and say something true that a grown-up would fear to say. But they are also subject to terrors, some of them irrational, and to anxieties. They need a stable platform on which to stand. From it they will be likely to step forward into steady adulthood. Without it, they will struggle; they will be less daring in their lives because life, they know, is frightful and discouraging. We are not giving the children of our country a stable platform. We are instead giving them a soul-shaking sense that life is unsafe, incoherent, full of random dread. And we are doing this, I think, for three reasons. One is politics--our political views, our cultural views, so need to be expressed and are, God knows, so much more important than the peace of a child. Another is money--there's money in the sickness that is sold to us. Everyone who works at a TV network knew ratings would go up when the Cho tapes broke. But another reason is that, for all our protestations about how sensitive we are, how interested in justice, how interested in the children, we are not. We are interested in politics. We are interested in money. We are interested in ourselves. We are frightening our children to death, and I'll tell you what makes me angriest. I am not sure the makers of our culture fully notice what they are doing, what impact their work is having, because the makers of our culture are affluent. Affluence buys protection. You can afford to make your children safe. You can afford the constant vigilance needed to protect your children from the culture you produce, from the magazine and the TV and the CD and the radio. You can afford the doctors and tutors and nannies and mannies and therapists, the people who put off the TV and the Internet and offer conversation. In many cases, the makers of our culture don't even have children. If you have money in America, you can hire people who compose the human chrysalis that protect the butterflies of the upper classes as they grow. The lacking, the poor, the working and middle class--they have no protection. Their kids are on their own. And they're scared. Too bad no one cares in this big sensitive country of ours. Posted by: Mike 2007-04-27 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=186952 |