Uncommon Common Sense

Here’s a novel idea: If you don’t want your kids digging up inappropriate stuff on the Internet, then you should supervise their computer use.

This uncommon common sense came courtesy of Public School System staffer Mike Murphy, a computer wonk who was featured in a July 27 Saipan Tribune article (“The best way to censor online porn”).

The debate over free speech, the internet, cyber-smut, and all the rest of it was recently joined by a reignited interest in violence on television–an issue that boiled to the fore in the wake of the Columbine high school shootings.

Americans love to throw technology at problems, even when technology isn’t the best fix. We love gizmos and doodads and whiz-bang software, but they don’t alter the underlying reality of the human condition.

And, for many families, the condition is this: Television has supplanted mom and dad as the family guardian, mentor, and babysitter. Is it any wonder that high school kids have mutated into armed Nazi geeks?

If you forced me to watch my daily four hour allocation of TV (the national average), I can assure you I’d froth at the mouth and go absolutely bonkers. My brain would simply fry.

We can re-jigger TV schedules to put the violent stuff on late at night, we can come up with all sorts of stupid ratings for movies, we can use blocking software to try to stem the tide of cyber- smut, but none of this addresses the fundamental issue: Electronic entertainment has replaced the family as the American symbol of longing and fulfillment.

Little wonder, then, that so many kids appear to be so totally screwed up. For that matter, so are many adults. If I was a kid and my father was some inert, television-watching lump on the couch, I think I’d join the Lizzie Borden axe murderer club. Why bother to bring kids into the world if the family icon is nothing but a 19- inch Sony?

Electronic media has sure given humanity a chance to craft its self-portrait. Smut and violence are what the people want, and it’s what they get. You can’t blame electronics for that. Human nature is the real culprit. Television doesn’t cause violence; it caters to simple minds that want to see violent images. Television doesn’t warp kids; it is merely symptomatic of dysfunctional families. The Internet hasn’t perverted people’s minds; people were twisted long before computers were invented.

But real, human supervision of children…imagine that! Maybe it’s worth a shot, eh? It seems to work for Mr. Murphy, by the way. Saipan has never been noted for being the good manners capital of the world (how’s that for wry understatement, eh?), yet Murphy’s children are extraordinarily polite. I haven’t spent a lot of time around them, but I’m darned sure that they’re not parked in front of the television all day.

Most kids are, however, doomed to worship the Electronic Entertainment God, be it piped in over cable TV or over the Internet. Anyone concerned about that might want to consider Mr. Murphy’s uncommon common sense.