So, I'm sitting here tonight, watching Animaniacs. And I can't help but think about how much our society and culture has changed over the last, heck, twenty years.
I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons of Voltron, Transformers, GI Joes, Spiderman, X-Men, etc. Coming home from school, I'd watch stuff like Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, Darkwing Duck, Tail Spin, Duck Tales, and the list goes on and on. Sure, a lot of the older stuff has some cheesy writing, but most of what we watched was original, or at least was actually fun to watch. I will admit, we do have some good original, or at least entertaining cartoons and programming now, but most of it, just isn't up to par with our 'standards' so to speak. I miss the good old days.
We are seeing a lot of this stuff come back though. Animaniacs is finally out on DVD, as is Thundercats, and, heck, even Pee Wee's Playhouse! And we have Transformers the movie next year, as well as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And Superman. And more.
Then there's the music, but that isn't really where I was planning on going with all of this. Last Friday, I went with a co-worker to see The Departed (as a way to get my mind of the shitty day I had...). I wasn't sure about the movie at first, but it did turn out to be quite good. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But it isn't even the movie I wanted to comment on. No, it was the commercials and what not before then. Taking into account the current state of our American government, with conflicts happening oversee with no end in site, and North Korea testing nuclear weapons, and then looking at where our society is in general, I do not see our culture surviving much longer.
Society is self-absorbed with themselves and with horror and sex and violence. We're dooming ourselves.
I may be completely off my rocker and my sound like some sort of insane blogger and don't know what the heck I'm talking about, and feel free to flog me for it. But, heck, thats what blogs are all about right? People mindlessly ranting. Sometimes good arguments are made, and I applaud you people that are actually capable of writing down coherent thoughts and arguments. I'm still working on that part.
And with that, I think I'll end my train wreck of a post. It started out well, and I just ruined it, didn't I? Oh well, such is life. I tend to do that often.
Enjoy, tear it to bits. I'll blog later.
--nullpuppy(out)
Educational Problems
Wed 10/18/06 by aj (not verified)Okay... I'll bite.
You aren't wrong, it's a long spiral process that has been going on for many years, and I think you can trace it to the changes made in our public school system. (Yes yes I know I have probably ranted about this before but...) When government standardizes changes to things that resulted in one of the most well educated countries in the world, merely on the say of some theories (and political pressure), what happens is not just proving or disproving the theories, but a cascading disaster where one poorly educated generation goes on to educate another, and so forth. The last 20 years saw the fallout, because it was the dominance of the so called baby boomer generation, and now us. You know as well as I do how poorly educated our country has become. We have become a country where rather than take special time to educate children, we pass them on to someone else so that they "don't get left behind". It is a sad state, when a country is worse educated when there is a special class and multiple teachers for every age group, than when it had one room schools with a single teacher for a broad range of ages.
Not that it's just the school system, the parenting is just as much to blame, more so....
And there is a chance for recovery, but it isn't certain - in chaos theory it has been noted that when a system reaches a critical mass, it can spontaneously order itself.
The same happens in society. Usually critical thinkers become the dominant force, and reform society for awhile. Which is how the USA got founded in the first place. It is amazing it lasted as long as it did before a bunch of idiots screwed the whole thing up......
I have more to say on the subject but I am prone to ramble off in even more directions than you did so perhaps another time.
p.s. Lines don't seem too break automatically.. nor will it let me break them.. thats alright I guess. My thoughts are an unformatted mess, so my comment just looks a bit more like the thoughts that inspired it. ;)
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