Essay About Little Chicks And Alcoholic Father

Violence on Television
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Violence on Television
We hear a great deal about violence on television these
days. Nearly everywhere you turn there is something being
written about it, or a program dealing with the issue of it, or a
news story about a child somewhere who was influenced by it to do
something harmful. The subject permeates our collective
consciousness. Maybe this is due to the ever-increasing number
of gangs in our urban centers. Maybe its due to the
ever-increasing crime rate that we hear about almost nightly on
the news. Whatever the reasons behind its being such a concern,
the fact remains that violence on television is a very real
problem that is quite definitely a contributing factor to
increasing violence among children and, yes, even among adults.
Cartoon violence has been around as long as cartoons have –
and thats a long time. The first animated Disney cartoons
featured a rabbit named Oswald back in 1928 and the cartoon
industry grew from there. So for seventy years now weve been
treated to the antics of various characters, either through the
opening Looney Tunes at the movies or the five hours of Saturday
morning cartoons that were a ritual with us all growing up.
There was Tweety Bird always getting the best of Sylvester the
Cat, Bugs Bunny always outsmarting Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck,
Foghorn Leghorn constantly getting bruised by the awkward antics
of his little chicks, Yosemite Sam getting his head blown off at
least once a week and of course, the memorable Wyle E. Coyote
who never, in all his forty-odd years of pursuing the Roadrunner
ever bought anything from the Acme Co. that ever worked right
(Siano, 20).
They were truly funny and, in some respects, cathartic for
us and it is this writers opinion that cartoon violence is quite
probably the least of our worries as far as what is corrupting
the minds of our children today. We grew up on it and there is
not one single documented case of a violent criminal who ever
claimed that he ended up the way he did because he ingested a
steady diet of Roadrunner episodes. Lets get serious. Most of
these violent criminal types werent home with the family
watching Saturday morning cartoons when they grew up. They were
out tying cats tails together and throwing them over somebodys
clothesline so they could watch them kill each other. Or they
were torturing the neighbors new puppy while Mom was at work,
Dad was non-existent, and all 3 or 4 or 5 kids were left to raise
themselves. Or they were busy learning violence first-hand from
their alcoholic father whose chief mission in life seemed to be
using them and their siblings and their mother for a punching
The difference, I would submit, is that even the smallest
children understand that these are cartoon characters, that they
are not real, and that the violence depicted in cartoons is so