“How do you talk to kids about Britney’s sister?“, bleats a headline that has grabbed a top spot on the CNN website for a day now.
Well, gee, I won’t. They don’t know who “Britney” is, and they don’t know that Jamie Lynn Spears is Britney Spears’ sister, and they don’t know that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregant, because, OK, because one of them is three years old. But the other one doesn’t know because we don’t subscribe to cable TV, which we don’t do because cable TV is full of nonsense non-news like the pregnancy of Jamie Lynn Spears. See? Problem solved! I don’t like the vapid, hypersexed nature of cable television and I’m certainly not inclined to expose my children to it, so I don’t subscribe to it. Then I magically don’t have to explain the sordid stupidity to my kids, and it’s all fixed. Imagine that: I can control what comes into my home. So can you.
While Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy has been tossed all over CNN for the world to see, there was absolutely no report on a filibuster of the FISA Amendments Act or Chris Dodd’s role in it this week. Because, that’s, like, what, boring or something? But that’s what we talk about over the dinner table at our house. So I have some advice I’d like to ask you for: how do I go about telling my kids about the 4th Amendment, privacy, warrants, and the rule of law? It’s kind of a tricky subject.
Telecommunications companies and cable television… are they connected in this cooked up sphere of spying?
If they’re asking firefighters to spy, why not the cable guy?
As for the kids, if I had any, I’d tell them that there are some people who say they treasure freedom, and then there are people who truly treat freedom as a treasure.