----- Original Message ----- From: "phillip holmes" <insuranceman@xxxxxxxxxx>
This reminds me that 100 years ago, people made music in the home. Now, kids are programmed by advertisers while the parents are away making money.
And...thus you have, in one fell swoop, defined the primary difference between, probably, the first and second halves of the twentieth century (with the downward trend extending into the XXI Jahrhundert, and the "decay rate" increasing exponentially...!).
A hundred years ago...or, probably, 85 years ago...folks made their own music (in the home, or in their local gathering places)...or, VERY rarely, went to see "famous" performers on local or nearby stages.
However, they also cooked (and to some extent GREW...!) their own food... usually bought items they couldn't themselves make from either local merchants are a handful of "mail-order houses"...wrote one another hand- written letters...provided their own entertainment...and often never travelled more than a few miles from home! (They didn't need to...!).
Today's "neo-humans" generally leave the "early education" (the passing of cultural mores and ethos, the native tongue, usw.) to the TV set... tend toward near-worship of "celebrities"...spend all too much of our time trying to get a bit of a lead in the Homo Sapiens dominance hierarchy... and then wonder why the "next generation" is so greedy, violence-prone, rude, crude and lewd...?!
Hey, just for fun, try raising litters of white-ratlets (or wotever one calls baby rats...?) constantly exposed to TV sets rather than their mama and daddy rats...!
On the other hand...now that I think of it...DON'T! Imagine a race of rats following the "rules" they learned from a steady diet of TV...?!
Steven C. Barr