Some things never change

The drawing presented here was crafted by my son when he was 6 years old, about 7 years ago. I have no idea what prompted this exercise in creativity. I thought that it was worth keeping. It indicates to me that we are curious creatures, even at such a young age. We are especially curious about our bodies and sex. That curiosity, and the appetites that develop at adolescence, help drive us. How we handle the appetites help define us.

I do not believe in government censorship. I do believe, however, that we need to shield our children from much of the drivel that passes as literature and art these days, at least until they are old enough to have developed critical faculties of their own sufficient to differentiate between excellence and excrement.

I wonder about things, sometimes. There is ample evidence that general audience movies, sans profanity and gratuitous nudity and sexual situations, perform very well at the box office. Movie moguls seem not to have gotten that message. There are plenty of raunchy movies every year, but there are precious few (excluding animated features) with interesting plots and characters and with a traditional family structure of mom, pop and kids. The same can be said of television shows.

Let's start a production studio, shall we? We'll clean up, both with the content of the movies we produce and at the box office.

Wishful thinking.

What got me thinking about all this is that my son, at age 13, is developing an interest in girls. I want him to think of females not merely as a means to corporal gratification, but as thinking, feeling human beings. I hope that growing up in our family will have given him the context and example necessary to achieve that end.