House of Eratosthenes

I was letting my brain percolate in front of the idjit box, like everyone else does, for a change. Feeling my I.Q. drop minute by minute, glassy eyed, slack-jawed, singing that old familiar refrain “two thousand channels and not a damn thing worth watching on any of ’em.” There was something on called “Real Housewives of New Jersey” or some such. I know nothing about this show. It must be one of those what’s-called “reality” teevee shows because something would happen, which would consume less than a minute, and then ten or twenty minutes would be spent talking about how it made everybody feel when the thing happened, the result being that on an hourly basis no more than two or three plot-advancing things would actually happen but there would be lots of idle chatter about how it made people feel.

Someone put a book on a table in a restaurant. This had the social effect of leveling mountains — for reasons that weren’t explained to me within a good half-hour. It seemed even longer. The book, it seems, is a non-fiction thing dealing with the sex life of the woman who put it on the table, and she wanted to get something off her chest about what people had been saying about it behind her back…or something. It took me the better half of an hour to figure this out, I’m ashamed to say I under-valued my time so much that I plugged away at it that long. When the book went on the table and three or four women interviewed said “I knew right away this couldn’t end well” I guess that just piqued my curiosity. I wanted to find which one was the dysfunctional twit. Answer, they all were.

Mothers asked their children to go wait in the car. Then everybody had a huge 1970’s pop-psych-type “confrontation” or what not. Why the restaurant manager didn’t demand they all leave, I’ll never know.

Simultaneous with that, I found myself browsing this page on the wireless (some images perhaps not strictly work-safe). And that is when it hit me.

Keeping kids away from the nasty stuff. It is a litmus test for civilized human beings existing like civilized human beings, no matter their country, the other aspects of their culture, their religion, their skin color, the language they speak, the clothes they wear, whether they’re vegans or meat-lovers, whether they do or do not believe in capital punishment, nuclear disarmament, solar power, legalizing pot, whatever.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, don’t eat the flesh of your own species, don’t have sexual relations with things not of your species, and don’t expose your kids to everything. Skip certain things when the company is mixed, or ask to have a word in private. Keep the dirty movies in one corner of the video store with a curtain in front of it. Treat the innocence of your children like something sacred, and treat the innocence of other people’s children as something even more sacred.

These are just basic, basic rules of any civilized society. People who don’t understand these rules, shouldn’t be living amongst people who do.

*bingo*
- pdwalker | 06/23/2009 @ 00:39

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Universal Sign of CivilityMonday, June 22nd, 2009

Universal Sign of Civility
Monday, June 22nd, 2009