Won't someone think of the children?

I’m sure by now you are all well aware of my deep and heartfelt commitment to making this world safe for the children, and I think my record speaks for itself. On more than one occasion I have been known to shout out, “Screw the adults! If they wanted consideration they shouldn’t have gotten older. We need to save the damn children!”, and my support of said damn children goes without saying. I have worked for a long time to make this world a more antiseptic place in which children may never be exposed to anything which might cause them to grow.

And I admire the work of others in this same vein, whether they are censoring gay Teletubbies or combating subtle, imperceptible, and completely indistinguishable bad words in the backgrounds of children’s movies. I even take the time to applaud them now and then, despite the fact that this causes me to remove my hands from this keyboard in order to do so, and then I must spend costly minutes finding my “home” keys again.

But there is a longstanding threat to the welfare of our most valuable resource, and if we don’t address it, we may as well give up on those little people and go back to valuing oil more than kids. Children’s television has an influence on all of us who watch it, and kids are no exception. It is by no small coincidence that the networks refer to this as “programming”.

For quite some time now we have allowed our children to find their role-models on TV, and as much as this may save most of us a great deal of time, it has its negative effects. I refer of course to one such role model, which happens to be a parentless six-year old who lives on the street, and is known to associate with garbage-dwellers. We can’t possibly impart good values on the children when we have this as our competition. I think the time has come for all of us to put down our cocktails and unite to try and stamp out this threat. Don’t we owe the little scamps a better role model than “Big Bird”?