So here we have a situation where the country is overloaded with high school graduates who are all but worthless to an employer. Their verbal and math skills are woefully low; their reasoning skills and common sense are low to mediocre; they have extremely short attention spans; they shy away from anything resembling real work. Many of these kids come from parents who are intelligent and hard-working. So how did this happen? A good start in solving that question would be to look at the 30,000 hours that young person has spent watching TV and playing video games, time that totally dwarfs their time spent reading and doing homework.


(More than a little related to the above)
When I was a kid, I remember being on the edge of overstimulation by the occasional Playboy magazine and snuck-into adult movie (back then that meant R-rated). I don’t know how the young ones today can concentrate with all the sex that’s paraded about on TV, in movies, in music, in magazines, and in the inevitable porno tape that they get their hands on.



(Thinking back to my youth)
When we watched TV shows and movies, the good guys always won and the bad guys always lost. What kind of cruel, twisted minds would so falsely indoctrinate the youth of a nation with such blatant misinformation?



The need that people have for authority, for a center of gravity, for a rock to stand on, for a compass point in a storm, leads them to become connected (sometimes irrevocably) to bad husbands, bad governments, bad bosses and bad religions.




Every year for many years now (sort of like the lobster in the slowly-boiling pot) America has been getting 1-2% worse in terms of media vulgarity and irresponsibility, the ethics and morals of its citizens, and general intellectuality/spirituality. What’s been getting better (and these trends tend to mask the declining trends) are the quality of techno-toys, our service industries, and the Internet.