Be Careful What You Wish For

by Rose A. Valenta

Remember the good old days, when you could turn on the UHF channel and watch Bishop Sheen on a Sunday? I really miss him. Our culture has suffered his loss. He was a great teacher, then everything went downhill and they gave his chalk board to Glenn Beck, who started using it to teach fractured religion before he finally quit his day job.

In those days, we went to Church every Sunday, and every day during Holy Week. We had respect for our elders, obeyed authority figures; and didn’t even know what flipping the bird meant, let alone use it to signal a traffic cop on foot.

Children had respect for their parents and grandparents, didn’t cuss in mixed company, didn’t expose their butt cracks in public, and used terms like “sir” and “ma’am,” instead of “dude” and “WTF?”

As a family, we were closer on rainy days by playing interactive games like Candy Land, Monopoly, Mr. Potato Head, Operation, poker, Scrabble, and Yahtzee; not sitting solo in front of the TV, wearing headphones connected to an Xbox and swearing loud enough to wake up the dead.

We encouraged the older children to take at least 20 minutes out of their day to play Fish with younger siblings, not sacrifice them to The Hunger Games.

Some frustrated parents began giving their kids biblical names like Joshua, Jacob, Rebecca, and Ruth; only to find out their little demon was flipping the bird to the teacher in kindergarten class and got a tear drop tattoo at recess.

Keep them away from drugs? Right! The teachers are screaming for Ritalin by second grade. So, you’re faced with two choices: zombie or a drop-out.

The entertainment industry is corrupting our kids. All of it: movies, radio, TV, and video games. You have a better shot at hitting Mega Millions, than teaching culture to our kids. We had to ban "Naked and Afraid" in our house during Holy Week.

They should have Toastmasters for kids. At least that would get the “duuude” and “bro” out of the vocabulary, right? The word "dude" for instance, can mean many different things depending on voice inflections.

We can't even teach our children good presentation skills as long as we have political candidates like Donald Trump running for POTUS, who cannot put two sentences together without first disparaging women, minorities, Obama, a federal judge, the Pope; and bullying his competition.

One teacher exposed two parents as being unfit. Their defense attorney proved they were not at fault because they both grew up watching Roadrunner cartoons. One of them got religion:




We’re screwed!