I Was Thinking... It Explains A Lot

There is a lot of talk today about the effect of social media on today’s youth. But since I did not grow up in the social media era, I’ll let people with a lot more expertise try and solve that problem.
Instead, I will try to figure out how the people of my own generation ended up like we did. As children, many of our parents or grandparents read us classic nursery rhymes. While reading to your children is usually considered beneficial, I have some questions about how those pieces of so-called literature affected us. Did you ever analyze the violence, lawlessness and fear woven into many of these childhood favorites?
Start out with three blind mice. Mice can be scary enough, but now we have three blind ones running around the house. Usually, mice run when we see them, but these mice were aggressive — they started chasing the farmer’s wife. If that wasn’t bad enough, the rhyme gets violent, as the wife cuts off their tails with a knife.
What kind of example did Tom, Tom, the piper’s son provide for young listeners? He steals a pig and away he runs. But it gets worse: The pig gets eaten and Tom gets beaten. This isn’t the only example of child abuse in nursury rhymes.
The old woman that lived in a shoe only gave them broth to eat before she whipped them all soundly before putting them to bed. But even women could be imprisoned in some stories. Peter, Peter, the pumpkin eater could only keep his wife by putting her in a pumpkin shell.
There were other rhymes that caused anxiety for children.
Even babies had to be fearful. What kind of parents put a child’s cradle high in a tree to begin with? Then they just let the wind rock it back and forth? They didn’t even pick a sturdy branch, because this one breaks, sending the baby to the ground. Talk about child abuse.
They are as bad as whoever allowed Humpty Dumpty to sit on the edge of a wall. And the results aren’t any better here, since he couldn’t be put back together. Great message to send to a young child. Even Jack and Jill couldn’t come out unscathed. First, they were engaged in child labor as water carriers and still fell down and got injured.
If the nursery rhymes weren’t bad enough, what about the cartoon characters to which we were exposed? Take somebody as iconic as Smokey the Bear. Here is a bear, wearing a ranger’s hat, ranger’s pants, and carrying a shovel. Did anyone ever ask what happened to the ranger? Was Smokey just burying the evidence?
We teach our kids not to make fun of others, but we grew up with characters called Porky, Daffy and Goofy. Did you also wonder what kind of message their dress codes presented? Porky wore a blue vest, but no pants, as was the same for Donald Duck.
Mickey Mouse wore shorts, but no shirt. Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound wore a tie and hat but nothing else. At least Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck wore dresses. And Bugs Bunny didn’t wear any clothes. Plus, what other kind of bad example did our cartoon characters display. Both Yogi Bear and Bugs Bunny were always stealing from somebody’s picnic or garden.
While we deplore the amount of violence kids see on TV today, what about when we grew up?
Elmer Fudd was always trying to kill Bugs. From our cartoons, kids also learned that if you stuck your finger in the barrel of a gun, it would explode when fired — not an experiment you wanted to try.
How about Wiley Coyote? He tried numerous violent ways to try and destroy the Road Runner. My other question always was, “How did the coyote get the money to buy all this stuff from the Acme Co.? Did he have a part-time job somewhere to get the cash?
Also was the Acme Co. like Amazon and would deliver right to the cliff where he needed it? No wonder so many of us turned out confused and maladjusted.

Did You Ever Wonder? — Why does Goofy stand on two feet and talk, while Pluto stays on all fours and barks, if they are both dogs?