Running Into a Meandering Post

As a general rule, The Common Man cares little about what others think of him. That said, good friend of the blog Mark Huffines mentioned the other day that The Common Man was something of a crack dealer, providing just enough content to get you hooked, but then to string you along with less and less stuff as your desperation grows for more of The Common Man. The Common Man understands this plight and certainly did not want any of his precious few readers to undergo withdrawal symptoms.

Because the semester is in its home stretch, The Common Man will have to cut back on his blogging, but does not want to drop off the face of the Earth. So, here is what The Common Man proposes, he will drop back to writing three entries a week. One on Monday, one on Thursday, and one over the weekend until the semester resolves itself. After that, how about we reassess?

The Common Man is multi-tasking this afternoon, writing a blog, putting away laundry, reading for class this week, and watching three different baseball games here on Opening Day. It's a busy time, obviously, that would be made less busy if The Common Man were able to avoid the festivities of Opening Day. But he can't do that. Opening day is a beautiful thing. For a moment, a brief moment, everyone is equal. Everyone has hope for a strong season, and can envision their team going all the way. Right now, the Yankees are tied with the Devil Rays and the Royals are tied with the Twins. By the end of the day, of course, this won't be the case, particularly because the Rays are playing the Yanks right now.

Unlike in years past, The Common Man can now watch every major league game thanks to MLB's Extra Innings package on his DirecTV. This is amazing. Fifty years ago, almost no one could even watch their own local team on TV, let alone watch them all. Hell, if The Common Man wanted to, he could watch them on his TV, his computer, or his telephone.

The pace at which this world is changing is both wonderful and scary to The Common Man. Sure, MLB's Extra Innings package is a wonderful advancement. But its a symbol for a society in which there is seemingly unlimited access to cultural productions. In the early 1980s, sociologist James S. Coleman argued that our social structure, in which parents were not around (because of longer, more demanding work and the expansion of the suburbs away from centers of work) and children were left to fend for themselves would leave the home "psychologically barren." Kids would increasingly pick up social and behavioral cues from other kids and from popular culture. Because the messages of other kids and pop culture are mixed, "the child has a less fully developed sense of what is right and what is wrong." The Common Man doesn't know that there is a crisis of childhood and that America's children are in some kind of psychological danger, but he does think that the decreasing role of parents in the lives of children and the greater access kids have to material that parents disapprove of (and that children are not ready to assess critically) is troubling. And how does a parent stop the flow of the river of information? Or, more importantly, how does a parent filter out the pollutants that somebody dumped in upstream?

Maybe The Common Man and The Uncommon Wife should just not teach The Boy any English. Spanish is an increasingly useful language, and Spanish-language programming sucks (so he'll be discouraged from watching it).