I bought the first season of Little House on the Prairie (they marked it down in the store), and have been binging on it. Damn I love that show! It’s so freaking corny! The first season was so full of down-home goodness it’s almost perverse. It’s kind of weird, though. I can’t think of any TV shows nowdays that show a happy nuclear family. I don’t really watch TV that often, but thinking back to the popular TV shows that were on when I was an impressionable youngster, The Cosby Show is the only one that had a mom, dad, kids all happily living together. OK, maybe Family Ties and Growing Pains (I hated that show!) Let’s see… Love, Sidney was an old cranky gay dude living with a single mom and daughter. Punky Brewster was an old cranky guy who ends up adopting a little girl. Silver Spoons was a single dad who refuses to grow up, and his kid. Married With Children and Roseanne showed us that screwed up nuclear families were funny.

Since most of the country seems to get their worldy information from the TV, is it any wonder why everyone’s family is so screwed up? Does TV reflect life, reinforce it, or both?

Anyway, back to Little House– Laura is charmingly plucky, Mary is a goody two-shoes, and Carrie is still really small, and has this permanent tardlike grin on her face. Ma and Pa are the perfect parents, and life was so much simpler when all you had to do to make the family work was churn butter and make sure the wheat crop turned out bountiful.

This show was on in the 1970s, when social upheaval was happening– the divorce rate was skyrocketing, and tv was becoming the new parental unit for a generation of latchkey kids. At least we had some kind of stable role model, I guess, even if it did come from good god-fearing folk living 100 years before our time.

Now that all of our basic needs are met, what’s left? We don’t have to kill, skin, and hack apart animals to get our food, that’s all done for us. We don’t have to grow wheat to mill into flour to make bread. We don’t have to gather eggs, wash our clothes in a stream, walk several miles to send a telegram, worry about dying of cholera or TB or amuse ourselves by family sing-alongs.

Is that what kept families together, the shared work that went into survival? No wonder the nuclear family has become a thing of the past– we don’t have to do anything anymore, except rudimentary housekeeping duties and throwing the frozen pizza in the microwave. Plus, mom staying home with the kids while dad brings home the bacon is pretty much impossible now. Can one raise kids on a single salary? Maybe if the dad is Donald Trump, but hardly any other way!

I mentioned in the company of friends “someday when I get a house of my own” and everyone snorted and said, “like that’ll happen.” I realized that I was saying that in an ironic way, like when I say, “when I’m dictator of the universe” or “when I have laser beams surgically implanted in my eyes and a couple of robotic arms attached…” Owning a home used to be a given back in The Day, apparently (at least for the middle class). There is no way I will ever own a house, unless suddenly I discover that my real parents were billionaires and died with me as their only heir. I will never own a house even if I quit my job and got a “real” job (i.e., Office Bitch). Seriously, the difference between making $20k a year and $30k a year really isn’t enough to sell my soul to a lifetime of misery for; this is why I don’t return to the world of Office Bitchery.

I look at how things were when I was a kid. It really isn’t that much different now. I mean, we have cooler personal computers that do more stuff, and everyone seems to have cellphones, but it’s not the difference between, say, when Laura Ingalls was a kid in the 1860s and 70s and when she died in the 1950s. She made the trip from South Dakota to Missouri in a covered wagon, and then made the trip back years later in a car. She started out churning her own butter and ended up seeing the nuclear bomb. Maybe when I’m old we really will have moving sidewalks and monorails and all that stuff they hinted at when they weren’t talking about how the world of the future would be a post-nuclear-holocaust wasteland where everyone lived underground or in domed cities and fresh water was a form of currency.

Technology seems to have backfired for now, though. I mean sure, we can communicate instantly with people all over the globe whenever and wherever we want. We now have global warming, which kind of makes up for that convenience. In 7th grade they warned us that if global warming persisted, all of Siberia’s permafrost would melt making it fertile farmland, and Breadbasket of America would turn into desert. Thus we had motivation to stop global warming– stop using so much Aqua Net or we’d all be speaking Russian and standing in line for days for toilet paper! What’s the incentive now? I mean, besides the obvious polar caps melting, water levels rising and flooding cities, extreme weather and all that good stuff? Nothing, because most people think that global warming is a load of crap.

Why is global warming a load of crap? I can’t figure this out. I mean, if someone is going to lie about something and fabricate facts, he or she is most likely getting something out of it. So, if global warming wasn’t really happening, what do those liberals have to gain by saying it is real? Is it all a plot to… say… sell more of Al Gore’s DVDs? What’s the use of that, since part of the proceeds from An Inconvenient Truth are going to The Alliance for Climate Protection? It’s not like… say… the oil companies who will lose millions if people start driving more fuel-efficient cars or the industries who will have to spend billions to clean up the pollutants they spew into the atmosphere if global warming were not a hoax.

The most compelling argument I’ve heard against global warming is that it’s all just a smokescreen so that the nation is so distracted by the thought of dying penguins that the liberals will go and OK gay marriage behind everyone’s backs. Uh, yeah. Funny how there’s a war that’s going on that we’re not winning, and all anyone can do is point out how them fags can get married and how that’s undermining family values or something. Seriously, why do people care who marries who? It’s not like family values are in any great state as it is! Whatever. Everything’s fucked up. We need a worker revolution or something. ::snorts:: like that will ever happen.