Tonight, after watching “Air Bud” (PG for adult language – “hell”) with my six-year old son I was prepared to help him understand that the “mean people” in the film were pretend. They were part of a story that was made more exciting by the presence of mean people or, more accuratly  mean characters. I was pushing the envelope a bit with the PG, but I knew Airbud to be pretty soft stuff.  I wasn’t prepared, nor was my son, for the commercial immediately following the show which was a combination of sexual and violence porn so extreme that the 5 seconds it took for me to shut down the TV was enough to bring tears to my son’s eyes and heart palpitations to his mother. This was all done in the name of promoting tomorrow night's exciting action film.

Burned into his brain, and mine, is the image of a wailing man, tears streaming down his face, with a bug-eyed villain twisting the barrel of a 9mm into his victim's head and shouting. The reaction on my son’s face – deep, unsophisticated horror.

My horror was directed at the idea that some normal-seeming person working at the network thought putting this promo immediately after “Airbud” was a  perfectly normal idea. No thought was ever given to who might view these images or that fact that these images might, to some, be very disturbing. I also realize, with equal horror, that the vast number of Americans agree with him. A gun to the head is very entertaining. Violence is just a way of making shows more exciting.

The problem comes when fantasies begin to manifest into our reality. They really do. In kid’s play and on our streets. We internalize what we see and it becomes part of our behavior “vocabulary.” Words matter. Images matter. It made me realize my planned parental lecture was wrong in a very deep sense. While it may just be a story, the feelings, world view and effects of  it are a dark reality

 …An aphorism is appropriate here – You are what you eat….err.. I  mean -- We are what we watch.

 (and what you eat matters too)

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