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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mrknowitall who wrote (13408)	11/6/1998 12:24:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 67261

MrK -- I am quite familiar with many of the problems you describe (I do not live on the moon -- unfortunately, perhaps), but I think you are fingering the wrong villain. I do not have time to go into the question at any length right now. Let me just say, for the moment, that I do not see a group of people, or a particular political persuasion, as the villain, but rather a vast technological revolution that no one was prepared for, and with which no one really quite knows how to deal. In my opinion, its social effects have been almost as disruptive as those set in motion by the Industrial Revolution. I grew up in the pre-television, pre-mass-advertising-to-teens era, when there was no such thing as a media-and-advertising-agency-defined "generation of the sixties" (now metamorphosed into the "baby boomer generation"), let alone a Generation X or leagues of children that suffer real pain if they are not wearing the right kind of Nikes (or is it Adidas?)... I certainly did not expect the wholesale commercialization of virtually every aspect of life to descend upon us as suddenly as it did, and it certainly took me by surprise. At least I never a television set into my house; sensing, instinctively, that it would be The Enemy. It is very difficult for ANYONE, of whatever political persuasion, to raise children in a country where the primary medium of socialization is provided by television, advertising, an artifically created "teen culture," etc., etc. This is all new, and people have not coped very well with it so far. The "moral relativism" you refer to does not stem from "liberalism", at least not from the old-fashioned liberalism I was raised on, but from the purely commercial philosophy of the huckster. Anything goes -- as long as it sells. IMO, of course. I will save my next rant for the question of educating the disadvantaged. I have some very utopian ideas on that score (utopian only in that no one would touch them with a ten foot pole, more's the pity). jbe jbe