Like so many aspects of life, innocence is a mystery. Our little boy is a beautiful example of innocence. It is our job to protect his innocence. One way we try to do this is by not having television. This limits his exposure to pop culture.
I believe pop culture is corrupting the innocence of our children. I rarely watch television or read newspapers or magazines, but whenever I do get a glimpse of pop culture, I am always amazed at how degenerate it is.
Pop culture seems to revolve around celebrities doing bizarre, immoral things. I don’t even know who most of these people are. They bore me so much that I can’t be bothered to read about them.
The only medium I am exposed to is radio. I have to do a good bit of driving and sometimes listen to public radio but not the news. Why should I listen to some announcer tell me in measured, dignified tones of every horror that goes on all over the world? The current stories are often about bombs killing innocent people in Ireland or Jerusalem. Aren’t these the same horror stories that have been in the news for the past ten or fifteen years? I see no reason why I should burden my mind with the repetitive horrors of the world that I am powerless to prevent or mitigate.
To be fair, I must admit that once in a while, public radio gives me a winner. When it does, it is usually music. Yesterday, on public radio, I heard a 1934 recording of Art Tatum playing “Liza.” It took my breath away!
I wonder about talk shows. There is a lady psychologist who puts on the radio trashy problems about people’s “private” lives and then moralizes about them. I doubt if this lady is really raising the morality of society by dragging all this garbage onto the public airwaves. Isn’t she really exploiting the public’s insatiable appetite for trash?
Why do people want to air their dirty linen in public, anyway? (“Doctor I have a moral dilemma. I’m sleeping with Jane, but I’m married to Emma!”) I suspect that most are motivated by a juvenile need for attention.
Anyway, even minimal exposure to the media convinces me that most pop culture is in bad taste, and much of it is corrupt in the sense that it exploits sex and violence in the youth market. You don’t have to know much about pop culture to see how it could harm the innocence of children who are exposed to it.
Even though we have no television, our little boy inevitably became aware of the impeachment that was going on. He asked his half sister, who had been visiting for Christmas, if she thought the president should be impeached. She said, “He’s already been impeached.”
“Well, if he told a lie,” our little boy said, “they should make him go home and go right to his room!”
My little boy’s innocence seems perfectly natural, but innocence in adults is a mystery to me. Why do some people retain it and some lose it? Is it possible that some people never had it? What, for example, is the difference in the formation of such opposites as Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Hitler? Was Hitler evil as a baby? If not, at what point did he change? Why does one person develop into a healer and another into a hurter? Could it be that those who lose their innocence become the hurters? If this is true, why do we tolerate a pop culture that ruins the innocence of children? Do we want to raise a generation of hurters?
I am convinced that innocence is the biggest gift we are given. It is certainly the most precious part of a child—the part most worth protecting.