The Problem with South Park's Viewer's Parents
Recently I watched a program on television dealing with teen violence. It was put on, I believe, by a Christian organization that intended to regulate the shows that kids watch by calling for mass boycotts of such programs and also writing to advertisers telling them not to support the show. There were many references to the Columbine shootings and other school shootings as well. About mid way through the show, there was a woman who spoke about her son. It was a sad story, no doubt, but I couldn't understand her reasoning. She explained that her son had been a great child and had gone to school and heard about South Park from his friends. When he went home, he watched the show and saw one of the characters, Kenny, who dies in each episode, be hanged. He, in turn, hanged himself that night, and his mother found him in the morning.
I felt sorry for her loss, and I was sorry that a person died to early in life. However, let's look at the time frame here. He hanged himself at night, and she found him in the morning. A single mother whose child dies at night doesn't even realize it until she wakes up. Was she asleep? Or was she busy that night and went to bed after the boy watched the show? Another question I have is why did the boy hang himself in the first place if he had been such a good child all along? Did he have no conception of what death was? Did he honestly think that life was like a cartoon and that, if he was hit by a bus or strangled, he would return for the next episode because life works like that?
What I think is that he had no idea of what death was. His mother had pampered him and kept him away from the idea of death to the point where the child was ready to experiment with it just to find out due to his ignorance. I can relate to this. Up until I was 12 I had not exposed myself to fire much. Since I lived in a small neighborhood where the houses were close together and the weather was dry and the tempurature usually high, fire wasn't a common thing as a utility. Instead we had a stove and a heater and the likes. Plus, my parents had always shielded me away from whatever fire was around. One day, I went into the bathroom and laid some paper onto a chess board and lit it on fire. Then it was hair mouse. Then mousse and hairspray, and then WD-40 outside. When my mother discovered matches in the sink after she got home from work, she asked me if I had been playing with fire. I told her that I had been, and she got a worried look on her face. Had the bathroom been much more filled with linen or whatever the curtains were made of, I may have set the house on fire. Luckily I understood my mom's expressions and ceased the foolish pastime. Besides, I had already become accustomed to fire and could partially understand how it moved about and how fast it went through different substances. From that, I was "desensitized" of fire as many critics of television would say. To them, they believe this to be a bad thing, thinking that fire should be held in reverence and kept sacred and never seen nor touched.
May I ask, have you ever noticed a sudden change in your outlook on things? What I mean by this is have you ever had feelings about an event or a group of things, then had an experience, and then looked back and thought about how those feelings have changed so much due to that experience? This fire, as I stated, is a good example I think. I, now, don't care much to look at fire nor bring it in the house. I understand that it could cause damage and physical pain because I have had experiences with it that allowed me to see these things. If I didn't know about fire now, and I became curious, I might bring it into the house and cause problems. But now that I had the experience I had when I was 12, I no longer have that curiosity.
This woman on the show, I think, was under the impression that one can live a naive life and be completely safe if they are guarded from the world. She had not exposed her son to such television shows, nor had she taught him that the shows were fake and did not relate to life in ways that would even be considered close. Instead, she felt that if her son were kept away from such harsh realities such as death and pain, and not be educated about them in order to keep his curiosity elsewhere, then he could be kept safe. I think that this one of the problems with our culture. It's not the violence on television. Violence on television shows us these problems. Like fire, it could prove a useful experience in order to bring one closer to reality. I understand that South Park is one of the least realistic shows when it comes to real life, which I feel is even less a reason to commit suicide due to a portrayal of death.
Recently my friend sent me a link to Daniel Quinn's site at www.ishmael.com, and I read a few articles dealing with how the government likes to handle situations like these. It's funny to see them react in the same ways. Their answer is to take the show off the air. Then the kids can go to other shows. Then those go off the air. Then they go to other things. The source of the problem isn't at the surface, I guarantee it.
The purpose of this essay was to simply clarify that perhaps we go about solving our problems in the wrong way and we should be more conscious of what goes on at deeper levels than the television itself.
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