When my son was little, there were several shows he wanted to watch that I wouldn’t allow: Clarissa Explains It All, Courage the Cowardly Dog, and Everybody Loves Raymond, to name three.

Clarissa was banned because she was a smart-assed (pardon me) tweenager who knew everything about everything while her parents were clueless morons. Um, I’m pretty sure that a natural part of the maturing process from toddler through teen into adult is believing that your parents don’t know anything. From where I was sitting, my son was going to come to this conclusion and might possibly develop the attitude that often accompanies this belief on his own with no help from Clarissa, the Disney Channel or anybody else. My days as the Slayer-of-Monsters-Keeper-of-Fruit-Rollups-Knowledge Goddess were numbered from the time his cord was cut. I was not about to let some sitcom writer with a stunted sense of humor cut those days even further. Forget it! Clarissa got the boot!

Courage and Raymond were punted for a different reason; but, it was the same reason for both shows. Those people were MEAN! Eustace was a horrible human being and, clearly, NOBODY loved Raymond. I have always believed that your home ought to be a safe place – a place where you can feel free to be who you are without fear of judgement, denigration or, as seen in these shows, outright bullying. I don’t know about you; but, I don’t hang out with mean people if I don’t have to and I don’t care who they are. Mean neighbors? Across the fence, thanks. Mean co-workers? See you at the water cooler….in passing. Mean relatives? Across the room at a family reunion is close enough. I figure I have like 20 energy points to use every day. Mean people suck up my energy points and what do I get out of it? Nothing.

Which brings me back to TV, movies and other forms of entertainment. Those mean people suck up my energy, too. Life is too full of REAL issues, REAL negativity and REAL challenges for me to spend all my energy points dealing with pretend ones. I noticed this weekend that I was spending far too many of my energy points on Facebook.

The amount of bigotry and ignorance that I see spreading there unabated gives me a rash. Seriously. People forward the dumbest things without bothering to check validity – like the one I saw this week purporting that Christian children were being forced to practice Muslim prayer. Those children were practicing a tornado drill! Um Fact Checker, Party of None? sigh.

Once upon a time, the greatest fear of nearly every kid I knew was “looking stupid.” Now is seems that the greatest fear is bad lighting – everyone wants the cameras rolling whether they look like an idiot or not. Fact checking is for sissies and fortune favors the BOLD, even if the bold are addlepated.

Social media used to be a form of entertainment for me. Now, too often it reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s remarks in the January 21, 1980, Newsweek article “A Cult of Ignorance” –

The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

It’s not.

This current culture of rampant, willful ignorance! Holocaust Centers? Land mass between New Orleans and Mobile? Slave ship immigrants? I just can’t handle it anymore! It puts my energy points in the negative every day (plus that nasty rash); so, to all these forms of “entertainment,” I quote the immortal Ice Cube:

“Bye, Felicia.”