Let's talk about that altar of passive entertainment, the glowing box of glee, the electronic idol that has entranced humanity, television. This much-maligned miracle of technology has been assaulted by a variety of splintered interest groups for a wide range of reasons, among them the fact hat it turns our brains to mush. Although I won't dispute its debilitating affects on the brain cells of those morons who watch 8 hours a day, there's another reason I'm writing.
With the recent shootings at Littleton among other schools and the half-assed soul searching that followed, a number of special interest losers (my mortal enemies)have begun blaming television violence for it. Actually, it's a rather old practice, blaming all of society's ills on the most convenient scapegoat available. Nevertheless, it's still annoying. I shall now endevor to debunk this mindless scapegoating.
I did some reasearch, courtesy of the Encyclopedia Britannica and found out that, believe it or not, there was violence in the world BEFORE television! At first I hought it might be a few scattered incidents, but sure enough, it seemed that people were killing each other all over the place. After some further research, I found out that it was a GLOBAL phenomena. Golly gee. So real violence predates television by at least a few years.
Then I compared violent crime rates in the U.S. to the rest of the world. You know what I found? In poor countries where most people don't even HAVE TV, the murder rate was MUCH higher. Hell, they don't even have many GUNS in those countries (but that's a different issue)!
I did find, however, that the U.S. does have a higher murder rate than most other industrialized countries for which there was data. One of which was the U.K. I'd spent time in the UK, however, and I KNOW that their TV programming makes ours look like Sesame Street 24 hours a day. They show movies like Pulp Fiction in prime time and COMPLETELY uncut. COMMERCIALS are imbued with sex and violence, and yet, their violent crime rate is lower than ours. Some of my French acquiantances complain how "sanitized" English TV is, and France's crime rate is lower. CANADA'S violent crime rate is lower than ours, and they watch the same TV we do (their burglary rate, however is much higher--go figure).
If you were to take out our intercity crime which most of these other countries do not have to the extent we do, our crime rates would be much more in line with theirs. Why? Well, the REAL answer is the history of racial tension in the U.S., but no one wants to hear about that, because it's not an easy fix.
So, typical to human nature, as soon as something happens, people seize upon the first thing that they can for an easy fix rather than trying to find the real underlying factors. Of course, by this diatribe I don't expect anything to change. I just felt like bitching.
The other lesson that any prospective employers should learn is that I'm a very dangerous person when I have too much free time on my hands so GIVE ME A JOB!