Media Matters has a report on the newest lie machine faux scandal being pumped by Fox News: the claim that the Department of Education is using Sponge Bob Squarepants to tell kids about global warming without telling them that it's "controversial", which is a little like being mad that the school teachers are telling kids that two plus two equals four when some cranks in a basement say it actually equals five. I'm really unsure how you would even introduce the "controversy" to the age group that likes Sponge Bob. How do you convey that there's scientific consensus on an issue, but that there's also a media-manufactured controversy fueled by people who present themselves like experts, but who aren't actually experts? What Fox News is suggesting, of course, is that we don't do that but just instead lie to kids the way they lie to you.
And what's interesting is that this sort of thing might have traction. The underlying assumption here is that parents have a right to have everyone else conspire to keep information from their children that could, once absorbed by the children, make them realize that for all their parents' blather about "family values", they literally care so little for their children's future that they're willing to destroy the planet they leave to their children just so they can air condition buildings to sweater temperatures and drive oversized status symbol cars. And a lot of people buy that assumption! In fact, one of the sacrosanct values of American culture is our belief that children are basically ciphers for parental egos, and parents have an overriding right to feed their kids all sorts of bullshit and even, at times, withhold necessary medical care because they've got some kind of quirky religious or New Age belief that their magic is better for them. I think a lot of people would really get mad if you said that parents actually shouldn't have a right, for instance, to tell their kid whatever political lies they want and then proceed to shield them from facts.
Which isn't to say I'm against the notion that parents should have control over their children. But I construe that as a responsibility, not a right. Children are just people who haven't really had a lot of experience dealing with the negative consequences of poor choices, and so parents are there to force them to make better choices until they grow up and accumulate enough experience that they can start making their own mistakes, and then some time around 30, they finally grow up. But people have taken what should be a responsibility---making your kid do their homework, making them go to the doctor, making them eat their vegetables---and have determined that this level of control is actually a right. A right to shape your child in your own ego-driven image, which we as a country euphemize with terms like "teaching values". But a lot of the time you aren't actually teaching a kid values! A lot of the "values" that get taught are not values at all, as evidenced by Fox News calling parent rights on teaching kids to squander our limited resources on the only planet we've got.
Not sure how to resolve this problem, since we have to give parents power over their children, and power is known to corrupt. But I do somehow think that Facebook encouraging more sonogram pictures with the "Expected: Child" option isn't making things any better.
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Anyhow, my husband and I are currently doing a major renovation to put in a backyard patio that we didn’t have before, and part of the process involves rebuilding retaining walls. And retaining walls mean drainage issues (which, in this soggy part of the country is no joke). I plan to create a planter garden on the patio, so I thought to have the drainage route into a rain barrel we’ve buried underneath the patio, and then we’re going to have an old-fashioned iron hand-pump to draw the water back up out of the rain barrel so it can be used to water the flowers in the planters. When I told this to my friend, he didn’t applaud that I’ve found an innovative way to save money on my water bills, he instead decided to tease me for being a hippie. So yeah. If it costs you an extra $20-30/month on your electric bill, people don’t give a shit about that because that $20/30 gives them a warm fuzzy feeling because liberals they don’t even know would be pissed off if they knew.
There are shows I don’t let my kid watch for a variety of reasons. I guess if I thought SpongeBob was indoctrinating my kid in a belief system I didn’t share, I could, um, not let them watch SpongeBob. As it is, I’m considering banning it because it’s annoying as fuck.
To me, the issue isn’t so much a question of how much control parents should have (deciding what your kid watches on TV is well within the appropriate scope), as it is conservatives expecting the world to never force them to confront anything they don’t like. They accuse liberals of wanting a nanny state, but they are the ones who really want to be protected.