The kids are not all right.

What time is it?

As Scientific American can tell you, Americans are not what they used to be.  We once were a country of people who cared a lot about others.  Now?  Meh.

Humans are unlikely to win the animal kingdom’s prize for fastest, strongest or largest, but we are world champions at understanding one another. This interpersonal prowess is fueled, at least in part, by empathy: our tendency to care about and share other people’s emotional experiences. Empathy is a cornerstone of human behavior and has long been considered innate. A forthcoming study, however, challenges this assumption by demonstrating that empathy levels have been declining over the past 30 years.

The research, led by Sara H. Konrath of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and published online in August in Personality and Social Psychology Review, found that college students’ self-reported empathy has declined since 1980, with an especially steep drop in the past 10 years. To make matters worse, during this same period students’ self-reported narcissism has reached new heights, according to research by Jean M. Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University.

I can't read this without connecting it back to the material I have read dealing with outside control of the rock music business.  And when I say outside, I mean WAY outside.. as in cryptoterrestrials or somesuch.  I have a few posts up that deal with that particular issue, but I could do a lot more.  None of that is likely to appear in a Scientific American article.

What about the fact that many people who report having been abducted by cryptoterrestrials recall that the experiences began when they were children?  Also not likely to appear in Scientific American.

Maybe that's because this stuff is bunkum.  But maybe not.  Either way, let's set those issues aside for now.

I have a simple observation for you.  I have kids who watch a fair bit of TV.  I always make it a habit to watch with them.  One thing I have noticed is the amount of random violence that occurs on shows that are ostensibly for kids.

The iCarly cast: Jennette McCurdy as Sam, Miranda Cosgrove as Carly, 

and Nathan Kress as Freddie

In one recent iCarly episode, for instance, the character Sam hits Freddie so hard that he flips over the couch and out of view.  At this point, Carly rolls her eyes and says, as if for the thousandth time, "I'll check for a pulse," or something similar.  This casual attitude toward violence, and treating it as funny, is one of the pillars of the show.

In another episode I watched over Christmas, this attitude is made plain.  Carly wishes that her life were different, and ala A Wonderful Life, she gets her wish.  We see that Sam winds up in "juvie" without Carly's influence.  Yet, there is really no reason that Sam's character should not be in juvie anyway, even with Carly's influence, as anemic and ineffective as it is depicted on the show.  The fact that Sam can get away with being a lawless punk is a large part of the humor of the show, and the Christmas episode makes it plain that there is really no reason she can get away with it.  She just does because that's funny.  Somehow.

Why I oughtta.. we always got our comeuppance when we misbehaved..

This is by no means a feature only evident in iCarly.  There are many other shows made for kids, and they all share some of the same tendencies.  Even when the characters aren't violent, they are often making fun of the foibles of others.  You know, showing the opposite of empathy.

She's not laughing with you.

Now, compare that to the shows we watched when we were kids.  Did Scooby Doo ever break any laws?  Well, not on camera, though perhaps there was an implication that Shaggy was lighting up in the van when the cameras weren't rolling.  Going further back, were Superman, Flash Gordon, or the Lone Ranger ever in a quandary over what was right or wrong?  I didn't watch all the shows, but I'll bet you that even if they were, the point was made that there is a right and a wrong.  Modern entertainment for children actively undermines this principle.

Who are you gonna root for: me, or that whiney blonde kid?

Is this a bug or a feature?

As I mentioned before, I could go very deeply into rock and hip hop music to show how these have gradually changed the perceptions of the young, or at least have helped to do so.

I wonder if I even have to make the point about video games?  Have you played any of these lately?  One of my favorites of recent years also disgusted me when I found that there was an intensely evil campaign woven into it.  I'm speaking of Oblivion and its assassin's quest story line.  This is so horrible, I can't even bring myself to describe it.  Yet other games have gone much further since.

Probably not the worst, but still.. I especially like the "child abuse" 

descriptor the uploader is about to report.

Why is this happening?  It's so widespread in all of our various forms of entertainment, that it really looks as if there has to be an underlying reason.  Either this sort of entertainment sells, which means that kids are demanding it and we are feeding that demand (rather unwisely, I'd say); or, we are actively training our young to be amoral, or at best apathetic concerning issues of right and wrong.

Now why would we do that?

One reason could center on the fact that the military ran up against a wall that caused the draft to be repealed.  Kids just didn't want to fight and kill for a living.  If that's the case, you'd expect early attempts to create this kind of content for children to have met with mixed success.  Were there shows in the 70s and 80s that were a little more violent than the norm, and that maybe weren't very good, perhaps didn't get good ratings, but that kept on showing up on the schedule anyway?

Oh my goodness this show was terrible..

Yeah, that one reeked in terms of story, and did glorify violence.  But it wasn't really a dud in terms of popularity that I can recall.  Also, it revitalized the brand for Hasbro, which continues to sell GI Joe action figures to this day, when it had been off the shelves for several years prior to the cartoon.

This demand for action figures was created by the multimedia monster we know and love -- Star Wars.

That's right, I'm badass.

I don't have the kind of time right now to really properly document my thinking, but I don't think it's a stretch for me to suggest that it was Star Wars, and not some nefarious government conspiracy plot, that created the demand that other cartoons soon rushed to feed.

The really interesting thing for me is how George Lucas, a terrible, awful director who has done his level best (even if unintentionally) to ruin his own creative product, became so wildly successful.  There is a story here.

It's true that he had done a bit of important research into what makes great mythic heroes.  (See Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, an awesome book.)  And it's also true that he had a template to follow in the science fiction serials of the fifties.  But his adaptation of this material is pretty weak.  The acting in Star Wars is notoriously bad, (with the meagre exception of the only film he did not direct, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back).

Kids ate it up anyway.  And they wanted the figures, by the millions, especially the bad guys, even to the point of turning one minor character into a major one.

Eat my metal boxers, suckers!

The kids demanded it.  The kids wanted to play with the evil dudes.  And we said, "You do?  Hot DOG!!  We'll make millions, bwa ha ha ha ha ha!"

Oops, make that billions!!

Now, I'm a child of the 60's and early 70's.  Back then, the "anti-hero" was becoming the stock Hollywood lead for a movie, but this had not yet filtered down to the young ones.  We ALWAYS wanted to be the good guys when we played.

My favorite book became J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which is not a book that is ambivalent about its treatment of good and evil.

Mostly good folk here..

We didn't like Gollum.  He plain creeped us out, as did especially the Nazgul.  That shrieking in the night that they did was much more horrible in my mind than they could ever make it in the movie version.  Shelob was not cool, she was a flat out monster.  Orcs were evil and stupid.

Is it an accident that the hobbits look like children?  Hmm..

Of course the movie version was made in this century and it bears the mark of what we are talking about here.  Frodo gets much closer, much more quickly, to the dark side in the movie than he does in the book.  (The end result is the same -- he still can't throw the ring into the pit and declares it as his own.)

Tolkien had meant to examine the insidious effect of evil on even the smallest, most ordinary of us, through the power of the ring to corrupt.  We saw its effect on Smeagol/Gollum.  There was maybe a small portion of him that was redeemable, but he was mostly gone to the ring.  We saw its effect on Bilbo -- it had corrupted him, but he was proof against it in the end.  Then we saw its effect on Frodo -- nearly turning him into a very short (and short lived) dark lord.

It's mine, bitches!

We also saw the effect of the ring on Saruman, Gandalf, Galadriel and Boromir.  The ring is unambiguously evil -- you must resist it with all of your might, and even then you may not be able to escape its machinations.

I've gone on quite a bit here with TLotR, but the point is that Tolkien knew evil was shiny like gold, that it would interest us.  His advice was to throw it into the pit.

In Star Wars, Lucas advised us to try to redeem the evil.  (Well, Palpatine does go into a pit of sorts, and then blows up with the Death Star..)

And now?  It appears we believe we ought to revel in the evil, to learn what it's like to be evil.

The question is not whether to kill them all, it's how fast 

and how cool it will look.

I hope I can be forgiven if I see a certain trajectory here.  And to my mind the trajectory can be linked back to the era of the Vietnam war, but I don't think we're talking strictly about a military-industrial-complex attempt to create more grist for the war-machine mill.  This also coincides with the rise of alien abduction stories and other weird tales, which exploded on us in the 1950's, 60's and 70's in a big way.

Which is to say, I accept that there is a "control mechanism" at work here, but I don't think you should look to the Pentagon for its source.

It's not our fault this time?  Hooray!!

I think maybe you can look around the Pentagon for some of it.  There's a very weird tale having to do with the rise of psychedelic music and connections to the Pentagon, exemplified by Jim Morrison of the Doors and his father, Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who was in command during the Gulf of Tonkin incident.  There are many, many other bizzarre connections with the military or CIA types and the psychedelic movement in California.  (But I don't think that's an effort by the Pentagon; rather, an effort by whatever the cryptoterrestrials are.  I think they were saying, "Oh so you wanna dance?  Watch what we do with your kids, suckers!" This jibes with the nuclear site flyovers and the livestock mutilations of about the same time, which smack of a throwing down of a gauntlet, something that Jacques Vallee suggested back in 1979.)

But enough of that for now.

What about going at it from the other direction.  Is there evidence that social pressures for good behavior are successful in creating kids that behave better?  Well, funny you should ask..

Because back in 1983, Norway had a serious bullying problem in their schools.  They dealt with it by instituting reforms in education that supported efforts to squash bullying where it started.  And the program worked.

Look at Norway, where the prevention of [bullying] became a major emphasis of the school system after three teenage victims of bullying committed suicide in 1983. There, everyone gets involved — teachers, janitors and bus drivers are all trained to identify instances of bullying, and taught how to intervene. Teachers regularly talk to one another about how their students interact. Children in every grade participate in weekly classroom discussions about friendship and conflict. Parents are involved in the process from the beginning.

Norway’s efforts have been tremendously effective. The incidence of bullying fell by half during the two-year period in which the programs were introduced. Stealing and cheating also declined. And the rate of bullying remains low today. Clearly, when a school and a community adopt values that are rooted in treating others with dignity and respect, children’s behavior can change.

In general, it seems that kids respond to what they see in front of them.  If they see adults and the media showing concern for empathy, as they did and do in Norway, then they become less likely to be abusive.  If you show them images of violence and apathy, as we do here in the US of A, then that's the kind of kid you get.

Imagine that, the kids are easily influenced by what they see.

American children watch an average of three to fours hours of television daily.  Television can be a powerful influence in developing value systems and shaping behavior.  Unfortunately, much of today's television programming is violent.  Hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence on children and teenagers have found that children may:

• become "immune" or numb to the horror of violence
• gradually accept violence as a way to solve problems
• imitate the violence they observe on television; and
• identify with certain characters, victims and/or victimizers

Extensive viewing of television violence by children causes greater aggressiveness.  Sometimes, watching a single violent program can increase aggressiveness.  Children who view shows in which violence is very realistic, frequently repeated or unpunished, are more likely to imitate what they see.  Children with emotional, behavioral, learning or impulse control problems may be more easily influenced by TV violence. The impact of TV violence may be immediately evident in the child's behavior or may surface years later. Young people can even be affected when the family atmosphere shows no tendency toward violence.

Who knew?

The take away point here is -- the kids are not alright.  The kids are getting strange.  And its everyone's fault if we don't do something about it.

Are we just going to sit back and watch it happen?