We celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, and then things went swiftly downhill. The next day, Republican Scott Brown was elected to the U.S. Senate, effectively ending any chance significant health care reform would be passed anytime soon.
Then yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that no limits can be placed on corporate campaign donations, something expected to vastly increase the power of corporations and lobbyists to affect elections. The ruling apparently applies to unions, too, but most of those are so relatively poor and weak these days that it is hardly a balanced equation.
Actually, I doubt how significant this will be. Most corporations long ago figured out roundabout ways to spend their money to help candidates they support.
I doubt that many will really want to be more overt about it. Nobody wants to be tortured with an old campaign ad years from now that says the equivalent of “Ford Motor Co. supports Richard Nixon.“
Still, this is bound to make political campaigns even more ridiculously expensive. But, to put another spin on it, we might think of this as the “full employment ruling for political ad consultants.“ And who can be against anything these days that might create jobs?
Personally, I wasn’t happy with either outcome. But they weren‘t the most horrifying news of the week. That came in the form of a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which intensively studied two thousand young people who were from 8 to 18.
These kids, who were assumed to be a typical microcosm of our entire population of young people, spend, on average, more than fifty hours a week talking on their cell phones, playing video games, downloading music, and otherwise staring at little glass screens.
Kids seventh grade and older spent an average of an hour and a half a day sending text messages. That’s pretty much equivalent to the time I have spent sending them in my entire life.
The survey found that kids are spending vastly more time with virtually every form of media than just five years ago. Every form of media, that is, except one. Reading. The amount of time they spend reading magazines dropped from 14 minutes a day to nine.
The amount of time they spent on newspapers dropped to a mere three minutes a day.
Three minutes for newspapers; ninety minutes for text messages.Interestingly, any socio-economic digital divide seems to have vanished - and that may not be a good thing.
Poorer, black and Hispanic kids spend even more time with media - about thirteen hours a day. And the more time kids of any background spent using media, the least likely they were to do well in school. Heavy media users were also most likely to get in trouble.
The solution is clearly to have adults in the family who are willing to take on the role of giving these kids a life.
They need to see things for real, not on a screen; to have real-life experiences; to read widely and randomly, to experience life.
When I was a child, I had to read dog stories and play backyard baseball instead of World of Warcraft. Maybe I am a hopeless conservative, but I am absolutely convinced I was better off.
"Hopeless conservative" is an oxymoron, Jack.
Don't worry; you're not likely to be called a hopeless conservative or even a hopeful conservative any time soon. So you've got that going for you.
As for the kids; I expect that some of those kids spending countless hours texting and playing Grand Theft Auto on a Playstation, will end up no good and in prison. Like some of the kids in the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's.
I also expect that some of the kids whose lives are spent in the digital world will someday engineer solutions to problems beyond our current imaginations. And that they will be largely inspired as a by-product of the amazing digital world they currently inhabit.
Some of them (very few, I suppose) might even grow up with better judgment about current affairs than Mr. Lessenberry. I don't know why Jack Lessenberry would be so disappointed by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC. After all, the ACLU took the side of Citizens United and favored the corporation's free speech rights.
Does anyone suppose that Jack Lessenberry would have trouble defending a corporation's free speech rights and First Amendment protections if the corporation had a name like, say, the New York Times, or the Toledo Blade, or National Public Radio?
Posted by: Anonymous | January 22, 2010 at 03:17 PM