A Rant on Violence in Cartoons
Posted
May 5, 2008 at
2:17 pm by
Kimberly
I know this issue is not novel, but I am beyond sick of cartoon characters toting guns.
Today my kids were watching the Jetix channel, which airs superhero shows like Spiderman, Batman and Superman. All three shows are rated TV-Y7. According to TV Guidelines.org, a TV-Y7 is “Directed to Older Children. This program is designed for children age 7 and above. It may be more appropriate for children who have acquired the developmental skills needed to distinguish between make-believe and reality. Themes and elements in this program may include mild fantasy violence or comedic violence, or may frighten children under the age of 7. Therefore, parents may wish to consider the suitability of this program for their very young children.”
I am more hardcore about cartoon content and do not let my kids, ages 6 and 3, watch Jetix. But my husband beat me to it and had it on for them when I came down for breakfast. He’s of the opinion that kids are going to see violence anyway; let’s let them see it in the home and talk about it there and they’ll be fine. I’m okay with that opinion, but in my house, three-year-olds do not watch violence. Period. So I usually win.
Anyway, as I reached for the remote to turn the channel to the never-offensive Noggin, two bad guys in the Batman show the kids were watching busted out machine guns — MACHINE GUNS! — and starting shooting all over like mad. I couldn’t get the channel off fast enough and then huffed and puffed for twenty minutes about the state of the world today. Then I called my friend and we both bemoaned the state of the world today, while my boys watched “Peep” instead.
Tags: cartoon violence, G rated movies, Jetix, violence in childrens programming
Sickos just praying for the sick is SICKENING
Posted
April 1, 2008 at
4:22 pm by
Kimberly
If you haven’t heard the appalling news about 11-year-old Madeline Neumann’s tragic death of diabetic ketoacidosis last week, you can read about it here in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The gist of it was that her parents decided to pray over her body instead of take her to a fucking doctor after she had been sick for two weeks and, at ten or so days in, COULD NO LONGER WALK OR TALK. Madeline was healthy before her episode. At her death, she was emaciated, as the body eats it own fat to raise insulin levels during diabetic ketoacidosis.
Around the same time, the idiot parents of poor little 15-month-old Ava Worthington of Oregon were indicted in Ava’s death for their attempts to ”faith-heal” the baby of her bronchial pneumonia–which led to a blood infection that could have been treated with antibiotics.
As the article about Ava notes, laws were passed in the 1990s that struck down legal shields for faith-healers after the deaths of several children whose parents were members of the fundamentalist church. The Worthingtons were indicted on Friday on manslaughter and criminal mistreatment charges, but it is unclear whether the Neumanns will be charged. According to a Chicago Tribune report, Wisconsin law says that a parent cannot be accused of abuse or neglect of a child if “in good faith” they selected prayer as a basis of treatment for a disease. An investigation has begun into whether the Neumanns had a “a good faith belief” that their daughter could be cured through prayer.
My thought is that if Madeline was FUCKING BEDRIDDEN, there’s no way in hell the parents could have had a good faith belief she would be fine if they lit some candles and said a few Hail Marys. Fucking assholes.
I believe in God, and I pray. I pray more when I need or want more, which sucks, but you can bet your sweet ass that I’d be praying to my God, everyone else’s God, the real doctors and the people that play them on TV if my babies were that ill. If my babies were lethargic and wanted to stay in bed for a few days, and they appeared to be getting thinner, and they just wanted me to hold them, I would probably have a Civil Protection Order against me to stay AWAY from the doctor’s office because I’d been there too many times.
My son had a five-day fever last year and the doctor’s office staff was probably referring to me as “Norm” from Cheers I had been there so many times. I’m not saying I drugged him up with everything under the sun, but I wanted a professional medical person overseeing my child and informing me thoroughly so that I could make proper decisions about his care.
My son ended up losing five pounds with that fever and looked so thin that I burst into tears when I put him in the bath at the end of that week. I called in my husband so I could run out and buy milkshakes.
What about the Worthingtons and the Neumanns? I wonder what they’re feeling now. Milkshakes aren’t going to bring back their beautiful daughters, and I hope all their asses get locked up for so long they forget what ice cream tastes like.
Tags: abuse, Criminal Justice, faith healing, Fundamentalism, general, medical abuse, religion
I Can’t Believe I Majored in Marketing
Posted
March 20, 2008 at
11:36 pm by
Kimberly
My husband told me today that someone at work bid him a happy upcoming holiday weekend and he stared at them blankly for a moment, a bit confused, since St. Patrick’s Day was this past Monday. “I can’t remember Easter ever being in the SAME WEEK as St. Patrick’s Day,” he said to me.
Seriously. I haven’t even put away all my Christmas decorations yet. They’re still lying around the utility room where I do the laundry, ornaments getting twisted in with the whites and showing up in the dryer two-and-a-half months after the tree came down. And for that matter, the stores were all splashed with hearts and cheap stuffed cupid animals and last year’s Valentine’s Day candy surplus inventory before I had taken my holiday wreath off the door. What’s with the Easter Bunny humping poor little St. Patty? What did he do to deserve that?
I have so many issues with holidays, whether they’re stupid-ass, modern made up ones like Administrative Assistants’ Day or based on ancient histories. But as for the marketing portion of my complaints, where in the name of God does all that shit GO when the holiday ends and the schizophrenia dies down? (I feel that way when I go to Garden Ridge. That football-field-sized warehouse of crap has to go SOMEWHERE. It’s mindboggling to imagine those mountains of chintzy, aisle-kiosk comforters in plastic zipper bags lining the already full-to-bursting landfills. I hope at least those get donated to charity, but there’s not much you can do with 6,000 extra little Buddha statues.)
So here we are at Easter. I was raised Catholic, so I get the religious significance of the Easter holiday for those who believe Jesus was the son of God and rose from the dead on that day. But where does the Easter Bunny come in? Maybe the question is not as pressing for non-Christians and the bunny is completely a secular creation, but I haven’t yet done my research. But I’m guessing a lot of Christians who recognize Easter as the Resurrection also do Easter baskets for kids on Easter Sunday (growing up, my family did).
So what if, in said households, the kids ask what the Easter Bunny has to do with Jesus rising from the dead? Holiday marketers may offer an explanation along the lines of, ”Well, kiddies, when Jesus was crucified, there was this little rabbit who hopped around the cross keeping Jesus company in the hour of his death. It was a very good friend to Jesus, and when Jesus’s body was laid in the tomb, the bunny kept hopping by to check on him. Then, God told the bunny that on Easter Sunday He would be taking Jesus home to heaven, and that Jesus really liked hard-boiled eggs, and would the bunny find some and bring them to Jesus so he could eat them to get some energy for his trip to Heaven? And the bunny did, and he brought some candy, too, because the disciples told the bunny that Jesus really liked Peeps, and the bunny just really liked Jesus and wanted to make him happy. Now go tell your Mommy to come to my shop and buy some crap.”
Ditto all that idiocy for Santa Claus. Though I do get the sort-of correlation to the holiday gift-giving and the story of the shepherds bringing gifts to the newborn babe in a manger.
This is why the Fourth of July is my favorite holiday (and it was even before my baby boy was born on that day). The only shit you see in the stores for this holiday is paper plates and beer napkins (and they take up about one shelf) because people just cook out. That’s it. They watch fireworks, salute the flag, eat big fat hot dogs and drink beer. There are maybe two days of TV commercials for the neighborhood department store or local car dealer’s Blowout Fourth Sales, but that’s it. The next day, it’s over, and you won’t find a leftover pack of paper plates anywhere. (Actually, at Garden Ridge they run out like a week BEFORE, which is just a scream considering that they have enough papasan chairs to seat the world.) And my oldest child does not, when we’re at Target, ask me, ”Mom, I know you’re not gonna buy me this toy now, but can I put it on my July Fourth list?”
I don’t know where I’d take the petition, but I AM going to lobby for a one-day combination holiday where every single one (except July 4th and my birthday!) is celebrated together, at once, on one day, with finality. Or would that make the marketing worse? Would it be a retail civil war if they were all fighting for holiday market share from the fruits of one day?
If the Easter Bunny keeps getting the best of poor ‘ol St. Patty, it may come to that anyway.
Tags: christmas, easter, Easter Bunny, holiday marketing, holidays, Humor, jesus, July Fourth, retail, retail stores, St. Patricks Day Are you there, God? It’s me, Kim, and I just want to go to Target by myself…
Posted
March 18, 2008 at
12:52 pm by
Kimberly
Remember those great Judy Blume young adult books? I checked out the one about Margaret awaiting her period from the library about a thousand times. Looking back on that book now, I can so relate to the waiting, the wondering. Except in my case, it’s not the waiting for my period. I got that about 26 years ago, and that’s what’s gotten me to the more important waiting I’m doing now.
I’m waiting–and praying–for the day I can go to Target. Alone.
When I can, the first thing I’ll do (after I tell all my friends about it and they beg me for all the gory details), is go browse the bra the undies section. And browse, I will. I will pluck every single bra off the rack and hold it up to my chest, read its label, and perform a material-feel check, just because I can. And then I’ll take another hour to try them all on. I will not spend my time there picking up and rehanging forty bras that little hands have strewn along the aisle, or chase small people out from under racks of underwires, or shush little-boy shrieks of, “Mommy, these are for your boobies!”
After I’m done QC-ing all the underthings, I’ll shuffle over to the sunglasses section and try on every pair. I need a few new ones now because my last two were thrown on the ground at the zoo and run over with the stroller, and stretched out until they snapped in half. Not by me.
Moving on, I’ll grab a coffee at the food bar without even looking at the snack bag rack and cold juice box display, then head to the media section, where I’ll read every single magazine and newspaper cover-to-cover. I will read for comprehension and finish every sentence the first time, even if it’s about poor Brit or silly Posh, just because I’m actually reading. I’ll relish the muted house muzak in the background as opposed to the elevated, “Mommy! He’s eating my yogurt!” background noise at my house.
Then, I will go try on clothes. I might even buy some, since I think the last time I bought anything new was 1963. Oh wait, I wasn’t born yet. It just seems like it’s been that long. Say what you want about a woman who fantasizes about buying clothes at Target; they make good enough stuff and if I can do that in the same store I get my coffee drunk and my reading done, well, good for me.
Of course, I’ll follow all this up with a trip over to women’s shoes, where I will try on several pair and stand very still in them, instead of trying to run in the damn things, tripping over those bloody elastic shoe-attacher bands while chasing cackling little boys up and down the aisles.
On the way out after 8 hours with my overflowing cart(s), I will bypass the toy department (actually, in my ideal Target experience, there would be no toy department), the Pokemon card display, the diaper section, the birthday party aisles, and the toy department (did I already say that?).
And I will be a good girl, and use my manners, and be nice to my brother. Please, God?
Tags: family, free time, freedom, general, Humor, Judy Blume, shopping, Target
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