Slippery Slope

I am officially a senior citizen, and I’m just a tad away from yelling at kids to get off my lawn, but something really concerns me.

I heard the other day that in the early days of TV, (days of which I was a part), the word “pregnant’ could not be said on TV. Today you can watch somebody get pregnant on TV.

"Dick Van Dyke Show" was one of the first TV programs to let you into their bed room only to find 2 twin beds hugging the opposite walls. Today’s TV shows don’t need a bed, the kitchen counter will do.

When Elvis hip-wiggled on the "Ed Sullivan Show" the camera never wandered south of his belt line. If the same rules were in effect today we’d miss the pop singers grabbing their junk.

If you heard the “F” word shouted, the room would go silent, it would mean some ice road trucker, a Marine drill instructor or a lifer must be in the room and really had a visceral life effecting point to make. Today you look around and the only other person in the room is a middle school girl having trouble with the zipper on her back pack. That same young lady goes to school in an outfit that in my day they asked a hefty cover charge to see at a strip club. Don’t even get me started on the pants-at-half-mast creepiness.

I always enjoyed listening to stand up comedians. The good ones worked at crafting a joke. Today it appears as if they can’t tell a funny story, one that is just plain funny on its own, they swear as much as possible to at least get a nervous laughter out of the audience, or the audience laughs just to show how cool they are. Carlin and Pryor colored up their act so I guess the young guns feel they need to do the same in order to be successful. I believe people laughed at Carlin and Pryor in spite of their language not because of it. It seems to me they were just as funny on regulated network TV. I never heard of anybody coming out after a comedy show saying they wished the comedian swore more but some how comedians seem to think increased swearing is the answer to a “bad audience.”

I wonder what words can we use now to show real emotion? What does the “F” word even mean today? When a woman conservative politician can be called the “C” work on a major cable network, are there any words off limits?

Compare "Leave it to Beaver" and "Ozzie and Harriett" to "Two and ½ Men." If I found myself in an alternate universe when I was 10 years old and "Two and ½ Men" appeared on our black and white Zenith I wouldn’t understand 2/3s of the 1/2 man.

My question is what happens when we go too far? Can we go too far? As a conservative I naturally tend to not take a fence down until I know why it was put up. Change, just because we can, doesn’t sit easily with me. How far can the TV sitcoms go? In order to set themselves apart, it seems they feel they have to “out-raunch” the competition. Will we have an all nude channel on cable soon? Soft porn is already there, will the network shows begin easing into soft porn in order to stay competitive? After that what? Hard core followed up next season by snuff films?

I guess maybe our parents and grandparents wondered the same and we survived, but are we surviving in the best possible world? The way society evolves is like the elastic on your old man’s underwear. Once it’s stretched it ain’t going back. Our grandchildren will live in a very different world than the one in which we live and we have created, and they will be OK because they will know nothing else.

But I guess the big question is, “Is a child better off over his or her life time being shielded from “adult” things until reaching a certain age, or should our children be taught to read using "Hustler’s Letters To The Editor?" I guess we had better hope it’s the latter because I see nothing on the horizon to stop it.

Now, “Get off my lawn!”


Lesson:  Change is neither good nor bad, or is it?