How Can You Laugh at a Time Like This? is a Dream Machine Site The Dream Machine --- The Imagination of the World Wide Web

Some years ago, I was chatting with my boss at a cookout he was hosting. He had just finished paying his bills for the month along with a number of maintenance items for his expensive suburban home. A black man, he had been raised in rural Alabama in what is politely called "respectable" poverty, With the help of scholarships he educated himself to a master's degree in pure mathematics and then, for the usual reasons (wife, family, etc....namely: money), he dropped out and got hired by a major corporation where he quickly found himself elevated to a management position. Along with his new found affluence, he acquired a beautiful home and all the problems of middle class living.

All what problems, you may ask? Well, things like reading the electric meter, fertilizing the lawn, paying the garbage collection fees for example, not to mention complicated income tax preparations. Having been raised in a suburban home myself, these things seemed quite normal and trivial to me. My boss wondered aloud how so many people painlessly handled these tasks he found so infuriatingly complex...harder indeed, for him, than managing a division in a fortune 500 corporation!

The second incident also took place some years ago. My wife's mother died giving birth to her while her father was in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II. She was raised by relatives, leading an unstable and volatile early life. Later, her father remarried, had a second daughter and settled down a bit. When her sister, sixteen years younger, entered her teen age years, my wife's stepmother wished aloud that her daughter not "turn out" to be as "sophisticated" as her step-sister, This woman, a Jew by birth, had hidden in France from the Nazis during the war and had a justifiable fear of "sophistication." My wife considered this proposition and responded, "You had better wish for precisely the opposite. The world is getting ever more complex. The more she learns about it, the more sophisticated she becomes, the better off she will be."

The good news is that my boss went on to become the senior vice president of the corporation and learned to "handle" the complexities of suburban living and my wife's sister became at least as worldly and knowledgeable as my wife. The bad news is that we still are acting as though OUR children need OUR protection from these same problems...and much, much more. We seek to protect them from sex, violence, bad language, drugs...in short, all the seemingly insurmountable problems (to us) of modern life. And, often we seek to solve the problems for our children by SHELTERING them from them. Is this really a good strategy?

Does it not make more sense to give them all the information we can dredge up...negative and positive...on the subjects, thus preparing them to make informed judgements when the moment arises that they are eventually exposed to the very dangers we sought to spare them? For, exposed they WILL BE. My parents would never have considered giving me pornography to "study" when I was a child. Furthermore, were they alive today, they would be profoundly shocked by the level of sexual explicitness in mainstream media, not to mention the kinky fare available if you search for it. Nothing they did, however, kept me from eventually obtaining, from friends and associates, countless examples of pornography.

The same is true of violence. The most violent behavior to which I was exposed as a child was on the football field. As a young adult, however, when I entered the US Army, I was soon stabbing my bayonet into dummies I was told to imagine to be enemy soldiers, while screaming KILL at the top of my lungs. The same kindly policemen who once gently urged me to be non-violent and productive citizen, now urge me to arm myself against the predators from whom they can not protect me.

Or, how about drugs? All the warnings from my parents, all the bullshit peddled by government and religious CEBBTO's, all the resources poured into the War on Drugs...all this nonsense has arguably done nothing whatsoever to stem the rise in drug usage and the associated societal problems associated both with drug usage and ham handed attempts to control it.

I not only feel strongly that it is a terrible mistake to shelter one's children from the sordid details of life, but I have personal evidence to prove it. The children of the commune in which I lived during the sixties, who were exposed to far more drugs, sex and violence than the average child of their day, are now all adults with children of their own. None has a drug problem. None has beaten his/her spouse or children. None has AIDS. Unfortunately, however, like us and our parents before us, they do not truly appreciate how much the world has changed and how fast it is still changing. I hope they do not, but fear that they will, attempt to shelter THEIR children from these changes.

The lesson? Do NOT censor what your children are exposed to on the Internet. Do NOT forbid them from learning about drugs, sex and violence. Instead, offer to explain and elucidate that which they encounter in THEIR lives and THEIR excursions, or, if you are unable or unwilling, find someone who ISN'T! Counter the explosion of often undesirable information on the Web with even MORE and BETTER INFORMATION. It's a hard, often dangerous and shocking road to travel. In the end though, we will all be better off for your efforts, especially your children.

Talk to you later...

If you buy them from here, we get a kickback!

The Dream Machine --- Network Services

...the best independent ISP in the Twin Cities

A newspaper near you.