Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us From Ourselves

You can count me among those who consider TV-Turn Off Week a giant crock of warm excrement. I'm all for reasonable limits set by parents on the amount of television that their children watch. But after a while, it gets really tiresome to hear about yet another organized effort to blame the ills of the world on something that, in the end, contributes very little to those ills.

Stuff like this drives me absolutely nuts:

"We have a lot of bullying, both boys and girls," said San Francisco police Officer Frances Terry, who is the school's resource officer. "There's so much violence in the community.''

Terry coordinated the effort at the middle school using a curriculum developed by Stanford University researchers called SMART -- Student Media Awareness to Reduce Television.

A controlled study of the curriculum found it reduced verbal aggression on the playground by 50 percent and physical aggression by 40 percent, said Robinson, who helped create the program.

"Kids are directly learning the behavior by watching or playing video games," Robinson said. In addition, children become numb to the violence on the screens, desensitizing them to the repercussions of aggressive behavior, he added.

"Thirdly, it really reinforces that aggression and violence is a way of solving problems," Robinson said.

Boy, those kids today - really stupid, aren't they? I have two of them, and you know what? I really do think that they can tell the difference between the violence on a television program or video game and violence in real life. And when you consider that the single most violent, destructive and despicable thing shown on TV in our lifetimes was inflicted on the country last week by NBC News, a "respectable" part of the media, it just shows you how wrong-headed and hypocritical this entire effort is. In the end, it makes people feel good about themselves, for doing absolutely nothing.

And please...people can rant and rave all they want about the violence in video games like "God of War" and "Call of Duty," but given the restricted curriculum that education accountability efforts like No Child Left Behind has left them with, where else can kids turn to develop the critical thinking skills that...hey, what do you know!...will actually help them develop the skills necessary to tell the difference between TV and real violence?