Not much today.
I have to start work early and the Internet hasn't yielded much fodder this morning. Two things:
Email bankruptcy? Novel concept. You get so overwhelmed with legitimate (non-spam) emails, you simply shut down your ebox and start over.
It seems rather extreme to me. Lawyers have a great way to keep emails at a minimum: bill for them.
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I missed this excellent Peggy Noonan WSJ piece a few days ago. Excerpts:
Click. Smug and menacing rappers.
Click. "This is Bauer. He's got a nuke and he's going to take out Los Angeles."
Click. Rosie grabs her crotch. "Eat this."
Click. "Every day 2,000 children are reported missing . . ."
Click. Don Imus's face.
Click. "Eyewitnesses say the shooter then lined the students up . . ."
Click. An antismoking campaign on local New York television. A man growls out how he felt when they found his cancer. He removes a bib and shows us the rough red hole in his throat. He holds a microphone to it to deliver his message. . . .
Adults have earnest discussions about how more and more of our children are being prescribed antidepressants and antianxiety drugs. What do you think – could there be a connection here?
Why are we frightening our kids like this, with such insensitivity? Part of it is self-indulgence, part of it is profit, but not all of it is malevolent. Some of it is just mindless. Adults forget to think about kids. They forget what it's like to be a kid.
ABC's John Stossel is a person in media who knows. He did a piece recently on the public-service announcements warning about child abduction. He asked some children if the warnings worried them. Yes, they said. One little boy told him he worries every night "because I'm asleep and I don't know what's gonna happen." . . .
We are frightening our children to death, and I'll tell you what makes me angriest. I am not sure the makers of our culture fully notice what they are doing, what impact their work is having, because the makers of our culture are affluent. Affluence buys protection. You can afford to make your children safe. You can afford the constant vigilance needed to protect your children from the culture you produce, from the magazine and the TV and the CD and the radio. You can afford the doctors and tutors and nannies and mannies and therapists, the people who put off the TV and the Internet and offer conversation.
