Last night my town made the NBC-10 local news with a story about showing third-graders “That’s a Family!” “A film for kids about family diversity”. It apparantly features families headed by those of mixed race and unmixed gender. About 300 families, mostly irate, showed up at a school meeting.
it is a great way to get more people involved in the PTA, if you ask me 🙂 But one wonders why talking about alternatives to the Mommy-and-Daddy-headed-household is so controversial. Over half the nuclear families are now divided. And the “alternative lifestyle” is a staple of prime-time TV, with freaks and fantasy increasing ratings. My guess is that these families’ V chips work better than mine, because my kids seem to know more about what goes on in the privacy of alternative lifestyles than I do.
What probably irks my neighbors, as it does me, is that there is very little support for family ideals of any sort. In the real world, family is “99% perspirations and 1% inspiration” — it’s difficult, tedious and subject to uncontrollable forces of erosion. So, when we go to our local video store to rent a movie to escape from all this — could we possibly have more choices for families, of whatever stripe?
Indeed, why can’t we get versions of hit movies, such as “The Aviator”, with the smuttier scenes deleted? And, hey Hollywood, could we have a little more about Howard Hughes as the ingenious aviator and entrepreneur that he was…and less about the playboy and freak he became?