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Let's see if I understand the current social trend correctly. It takes money to live in America, but most people don't inherit nearly enough. So they have to work.
One job doesn't provide enough money, so there are two wage-earners in many households. If there's only one parent, that parent has to take an outside job on account of welfare reform -- the constitution of the old Soviet Union contained a clause requiring every citizen to work, and we've apparently borrowed that provision.
The adults are experiencing their careers, but the children need care. So, instead of questioning a social and economic system that is deliberately designed to children of parental attention, the adults turn to government for solutions.
And government responds with a host of measures to
protect children
so that the labor pool will be as
large as possible, thereby keeping wages low and preventing
inflation. As we all know, terrible things will happen if
you make an extra $5,000 in a year, but good things happen
if Phil Anschutz makes an extra $1.5 billion in a year.
So, to keep our civilization from collapsing, government at all levels must protect children so that their parents are free to toil for low wages.
This explains a lot of things, such as School District 11 in Colorado Springs, which suspended an elementary student for sharing lemon gumdrops -- when there's a War on Drugs, we can't be too careful, you know.
Parents who don't have time for such folderol expect the
school to protect their children from all chemical
substances
-- which covers just about everything on
earth, including air and food and water, except perhaps
plasma in fusion-research laboratories.
Then there's the response to a Massachusetts murder. Our betters, who have better things to do than raise their own children, tell us that closer regulation is needed for the au pair program, lest some other imported nanny go berserk. This means higher taxes, of course, but who among us is not willing to subsidize these poor, oppressed dual-career parents who are just too overwhelmed to tend to any children they brought into the world?
And there's the do-gooder criticism of the National
Rifle Association's Eddie Eagle
program, which
stresses things like gun safety and that kids should not
touch any firearm they might find lying around.
In a country with so many guns, this sounds like plain
common sense, but the critics say it is instilling the
gun culture
into American youngsters, thereby making
them future NRA members.
A moment's thought would reveal that there's no reason
for such worries. My own generation produced hordes of
pacifists, anti-war activists and the like, yet we were
steeped in the gun culture
during our youth: John
Wayne movies, BB guns, lots of World War II surplus stuff
to play with, ranging from smoke grenades to Enfields.
In short, a pervasive gun culture
produces more
pacifists than it does militiamen, but mere truth has never
bothered do-gooders before in their desire to get the
government to relieve parents of the time-consuming,
job-wasting chores of tending their children.
Yesterday, various technology and media companies
announced their plans to prevent children from accessing
adult-oriented material on the global computer
network.
In other words, some voluntary
censorship is
coming because influential modern parents are too busy to
hang around when their children are on-line, and the big
companies in this business -- America On-Line, Disney --
want to get bigger.
They're worried that if parents are leery of what their
kids might encounter on the Internet, then the network
won't grow into a mass medium.
If families feel it's not a family place, there's no
way it's going to become as popular as televisions,
according to Jake Winebaum, who runs Disney's on-line
division.
Right. And if it becomes as banal and lowest-common-denominator as television, why do we need it if we already have TV networks?
A sensible society would figure that the Internet does
one thing, and television another. It wouldn't try to turn
one into the other, so that big media companies can get
even bigger, all in the guise of protecting
children.
This imaginary sensible society might also conclude that it probably doesn't matter all that much what children are exposed to anyway -- people who grew up a century ago amid legal heroin and open prostitution still went on to live stable and productive lives -- and so controlling what children are exposed to is not any reason to suspend lemon-drop pushers and the Bill of Rights.
And in the sensible society, if parents think it's important to control what their children see, they're perfectly free to do so.
But in our society, we want parents out there toiling, so that they don't have time for their children, and it's little wonder that the parents turn to government for help. Too bad they don't challenge the entire system, so that they might have time to do it themselves.
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