X - rated World

[iron_and_silver]

Taken from the last page of Erma Bombecks's 1970 book, I Lost Everything in the Post - natal depression. I read it and thought it still rang true..31 years later.


I got some flack on a column I once did on horror movies. Some readers felt I was conding violence and bad taste for letting my children see that.

There is a time when I probably would have agreed with them. That is when the world had a GP rating and horror movies were rated x.

Maybe it's time we stopped flapping about the world of make - believe ("did tarzan marry the girl or not? and was the chimp illegitimate?") and zero in on the big problem: reality.

We are shocked when our children see rats, snakes, and frogs devouring humans. We can turn our backs when they are live -ins and most slums around the country.

We scream censorship when there is murder committed before our children's eyes on the tube.
We can endure it when it appeared on the 6 o'clock news with the dateline: vietnam.

My children and their short span on earth have seen Watts in flames, mothers with clubs and rocks protesting schools, college students slain by national guardsmen, mass slaughter in california, and political conventions that defy anything that they see on the movie screen.

They have heard language from congress man that curls their hair. They have seen animals slain to extinction by human with clubs and shot at by moving cars. They have flinched from gunshots that fell leaders of countries because they hold views that are different from those who slew them.

I challenge you to protect a generation from violence that has seen the horrors of Kent, Dallas, and Attica.

If it dosen't, it should bother someone that our children are short on laughter. We are giving birth to the most educated, bright, intelligent, serious, dedicated group of adults who ever sat in a playpen. Where is the little mouse who used to outsmart the cat in the cartoons? Where is the newspaper man who used to dress in a phonebooth and wear wrinkled underwear with a cape? Where indeed?

Bonnie and Clyde was a joke to young movie - goers... a gasp. So was Butch Cassidy and the Sun dance kid. So was Willard to them, the violence was exaggerated, upsurd, unreal. It's the reality that frightens them and gives them nightmares. God help us. It does me too.