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

To: one_less who wrote (14682)	11/12/1998 8:35:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 67261

Re: Teenagers & their Temptations Thanks for the elucidation, Abdul Haq. I have to admit that in supporting your statement about the "social grenades" in the hands of teenagers (why should you be surprised that I supported it, by the way?), I had in mind a lot more than sex. In this society, at this time, teenagers are exposed to all KINDS of temptations, luring them to over-indulgence in everything from booze to drugs to violence to sex to idiotic forms of "entertainment" to you name it. My generation (actually, we did not even use the term "my generation" -- "generations" had not been invented yet) had been relatively sheltered from "adult" temptations. Now, I am going to repeat myself once again, and say that I feel the primary culprit for all this is the communications revolution, which brought us television,intrusive and ubiquitous mass advertising, the targeting of the "teenage market", consumerism & anything-goes hucksterism on an unprecedented scale. (U.S. corporations that profit from this sort of thing have to bear their share of blame for creating the situation, in my opinion. The least one can do is to refuse to buy their stock.) End of rant. Now, the question is, how do we protect our children from this across-the-board onslaught? When parents try to do it alone, it is often like trying to lock the doors against a sandstorm. I agree that doing something at the political level is also out, because of its inherent divisiveness. So what to do at the "grass-roots level"? On the practical level: get involved -- and encourage your children to get involved -- in church and community activities, in volunteerism. Take your children regularly to the symphony, to the museum...Expand both their aesthetic and their ethical sensibilities, their real "connectedness" with others, and keep them away from as much trivia as possible. Now, does this help us with teenage sex? Perhaps a little. A normal youngster who has respect for himself and others, as well as an appreciation of the "higher" things of life, is probably going to be less likely to engage in promiscuous sex, in the dictonary sense of that word (not Mr. K's). I personally would not like teenagers to engage in sex at all, not so much because of the dangers of disease or pregnancy, but because they emotionally are not really capable of handling sex. But in other societies teenagers actually marry in their mid-teens. That is certainly one way of handling "the problem." But that is not going to happen here, where people get married later & later. (South Carolina, incidentally, will be upping the marriage age from 14 -- !! -- to 18.) Meanwhile, we are still dealing with natural urges, and in an environment where satisfying those urges is regarded as normal (if not necessarily desirable). Thus, for the time being, it seems to me, we will have to put our primary reliance on education and condoms. As for revolution -- well, revolutions usually cover a lot more than the "sex problem". jbe