The coddled children of unreality

Back when I was a kid, we didn't have video games. Television was two channels of grainy black-and-white network television plus one very fuzzy almost-out-of-range network on a 19" console in the living room and frankly except for Saturday mornings none of it was really interesting for a kid.

Instead, we played outside. We had imagined kingdoms in our back yard, complete with soldiers, cop car chases (hey, we did watch SOME television in the evenings after it was too dark to play outside!), pretend wars complete with dirt clods, and so forth. We roamed the neighborhood like little savages, forming up into groups of kids that would be called "gangs" nowdays. We found buried treasure in the drainage ditch behind our house (okay, so it was another group of kids' "secret stash", not much interesting in there except the Playboy, which was avidly perused for clues to the mystery of why older kids and grown-ups were always talking about girls when from our perspective as pre-teen boys girls were boring), we cut down bamboo poles using saws sneaked out of our parents' houses and went fishing and caught snapping turtles instead (or rather the snapping turtles took away our hook and sinker when they snapped through the line). We climbed trees, shimmied across sewer pipes laid across creeks, and rode our bikes all over. We learned some things about reality then. We learned that when it started raining outside and you were way back in the "wilderness" and got all wet, you wouldn't melt but you'd get pretty cold and start shivering if it was cool outside. We learned that you could cut yourself with a knife and bleed and it hurt. We learned that if the sun was really, really hot, you got out of the sun and went into the shade. We learned the hard way that falling out of a tree you might break your arm or collarbone or leg.

All of us managed to survive to adulthood despite the occasional broken bone, sprains, cuts, whatever. Pretty much all of us are productive citizens of the nation. And we had a blast, while learning a bit about reality, about what it's like to be thirsty, hot, hungry, tired, hurt, and how to be comfortable in our own skins because there wasn't anything other choice. I feel sorry for today's kids, who are protected, coddled, allowed no freedom, prevented from having all those bumps and bee stings and other minor tragedies of childhood that help you figure out what's real and what's, well, bullshit, who instead spend most of their time in a bullshit world of television and video games.

Which is why I can't get upset about the fact that CBS apparently shot a reality TV show involving kids that was at least borderline illegal. From everything I remember from being a kid, from everything I've heard, the kids involved in "Kid Nation" must have had a blast. Talk about your summer camps on steroids! And six weeks of that is hardly going to harm a kid. If they learned a bit about themselves and about what life is really like, in my opinion what they got from the show is worth far more than the six weeks of school they missed.

Indeed, the only real beef I have is that if the show actually gets good ratings, well, the kids get zilch. That's the kind of exploitation that child labor laws were created to avoid, and apparently CBS took advantage of a loophole in New Mexico law to say that they were just running a "summer camp" rather than a television production in order to avoid having to deal the kids in on the show's profits. That bit of child exploitation, rather than the show itself, is the only thing that gets me irate. If it's true that this is what happened (i.e. that the kids' parents got paid a flat $4,000 for their kids' participation in what was billed as a "summer camp experience"), CBS ought to be ashamed of itself for their crime of child exploitation, and the government of New Mexico ought to head after them with all legal guns roaring until a settlement is reached that properly compensates the kids for their time. Other than that... where's the beef?

-- Badtux the Heretic Penguin