July 12th, 2020. Watch what you eat.

This morning we played a “secular humanist” congregation called Oasis out of Houston, TX. I participated in some of the chat and their speaker for the morning was an “atheist Jew” who’d been doing things like applying to be a notary and then taking a state to court over laws that keep atheists from holding office. An interesting morning, an interesting talk. It was good to communicate with people.

We’ve been watching Rick and Morty, and I’ve been thinking about the rating : TV-MA. I think it’s easy to think of the “mature” rating as simply being a by-product of the way characters shoot and maim and kill one another, or all the belching and the liberal use of the s word, the sprinkled use of the f word, and a seasoned tasting of occasional MFs to boot. But I think it’s possible we misunderstand the rating. Or at least – we certainly understand the way it OUGHT to be used – because there are shows like these that are definitely taking aim at society, and subversively attacking it by showing horrible behaviour. And we laugh. And we cringe. But we’ve got to be emotionally mature enough to grasp that it’s entertainment, satire, storytelling – and though there’s a message being put forth, it’s not like Sesame Street where the message is there to be emulated.

I had no affection for Family Guy (though parts of it were funny) or the Simpsons before it – not because I didn’t appreciate what they were doing, laughing at the stupid everyman – but because I didn’t think the people who laughed along with Homer Simpson got that they lowered themselves with every “doh” and “eat my shorts”. That these were not characters to be emulated and modeled after – but to be despised. Hence the adult timeslot.

Hence the TV-MA rating.

A friend was remarking how we went from Jerry Springer being something you tuned into to watch the trainwreck, to being something that’s related to or regarded as truth. The Real Housewives that weren’t real, reality TV that’s not reality… then the slippery slope to news that wasn’t just edited to gain salacious viewership, but news that’s been created to gain salacious viewership.

We’ve raised generations of children on television now. Generations that didn’t get the joke at the time, but became the joke IN time. Some of them grew up. Some of them grew out of it. But I don’t think most of them did. And now THEIR kids are being raised on social media.

I feel like it’s important to remember : real Life isn’t what we see on Facebook. Not everyone is as angry as my carefully curated-for-clicks timeline. Not everyone is as stunningly beautiful as the tiktok ads on Instagram. We fall into it though, and have to remind ourselves “this isn’t real Life”. But I think we’re forgetting that the next generation has grown up with it and doesn’t have the litmus test of the Before Times. They grew up knowing that trolling was hilarious and beyond that, normal. They know they can get a butt like that if they just watch the whole ad. They know they can get a house like that if they just get enough viewers. They know they can get enough viewers if they’ve got a butt like that.

And they’re growing up knowing … not that the comments are horrible …. they grew up never knowing a time when there was anything BUT the comments… they never knew headlines that weren’t clickbait. (Maybe neither did we, but at least they had to fill the half hour or the half page with something enticing).

And so I fear we fall further into the trap – raising another generation and another – not emotionally mature to get the joke. Becoming the joke.

Curate your damn feed. And think about the word “feed”. You are what you eat and we should all be much, much, much more careful about what we’re ingesting.