There was the high school kid in the stands at the football
game with "suck it" and "DX rules" handwritten
on his baseball cap.
There was the elementary school student walking into class
with the "Two Words: S**K IT" shirt. And there were
the thousands of young children and wannabe adults at the
arenas doing crotch chops.
I could look at all of these kids and frown, but I'd much
rather frown at their parents.
Wrestling companies (namely the World Wrestling Federation
and Extreme Championship Wrestling) are offering up weekly
television shows that feature everything from women tearing
the clothes off of each other to wrestlers offering suggestions
on how to service their sexual organs. I often wonder how
any parent can allow their 8-year-old child to watch wrestling,
as we know it today.
In a world as desensitized to sex and violence as our society
has become, when does a parent finally draw the line? What
would Vince McMahon have to put on TV before people
finally stop letting their kids watch "Raw Is War"?
Considering how little uproar the sight of a crucified Steve
Austin has caused, maybe Vince can get away with putting
anything on Raw.
And how many times has Extreme Championship Wrestling had
segments involving men attacking women? Even Joey Styles
admitted on Wrestling Radio that he didn't condone those segments,
but he doesn't seem to have a problem cashing his paychecks.
The fact is that companies will do whatever produces the
most income. If Vince McMahon cared about the upbringing of
your children, he would have stopped Steve Austin from saying
"ass" or flipping the bird as soon as it happened.
If Paul Heyman were worried about how young males would
treat young females, he would not have allowed Tommy Dreamer
to piledrive Beulah McGillicutty.
It's at that point when a parent should have looked at what
images a child was viewing and simply changed the channel
or turn the television off. When that doesn't happen, a parent
is basically telling McMahon and Heyman to raise their child.
(And if you had the "pleasure" of hearing Shane
McMahon's work on "Sunday Night Heat", you know
that Vince has spent very little time teaching his son about
wrestling commentary.)
It's hard for me to take such a stance against the wrestling
business, especially since I grew up watching Southwest Championship
Wrestling (now available in the Wrestling Classics video store).
Southwest certainly didn't lack in the violence department,
but it was nowhere near the levels that we see in today's
wrestling. Regardless, my father always watched the show with
me, so he knew what I was seeing and decided I was smart enough
to watch a show and not emulate what I was seeing. You can
bet that my father wouldn't have allowed me to wear a shirt
that said "suck it" on it, much less wear it to
school.
Unfortunately, that type of parenting doesn't happen as
much these days. I know small children who learn more from
"Barney" than they do from their parents. I know
preteens that see very little of their parents, which means
those kids can watch whatever television shows they want to
watch without fear of a parent's judgment.
The real problem is the parents that not only allow their
young children to watch these adult-oriented wrestling shows,
but allow their kids to emulate the wrestlers. Need proof?
Look at the line of people waiting to purchase tickets to
a WWF show, and you'll see kids giving crotch chops or yelling,
"suck it," to everyone that walks by while their
parents laugh and egg their kids on.
Quite frankly, the wrestling fan base was scary enough, but
the next generation of wrestling fans is so scary that I have
no desire to raise a child. The real world was scary enough,
but when televised wrestling leads to the infiltration of
crotch chops in schools, maybe it's time to take a step back
and look at what's going on.
Granted, every single kid that watches Raw isn't going to
flip off every authority figure they see, give a crotch chop
in public, or give a DDT to a girl they don't like. A T-shirt
never killed anyone, no matter how vulgar the message on it
may be.
Until then, it's becoming more and more apparent that this
is not a country where what a child may experience in his
or her life outweighs the perils, evils, and obstacles that
the child may meet.
The age of innocence is gone, and people are blind to its
departure. Some are even waving goodbye to that era.
You can bet McMahon and Heyman are wearing their elbows out
while waving.
