We are a nation of consumers. And there's nothing wrong with that.

I've never understood what parents felt when they were upset about their children encountering unforeseen sex and violence via media that they are not always able to filter. I grasped the concept, and understood why, but I've never sympathized; I've never felt on a physiological level the emotions and the adrenalinic affect of being terrified that someone you loved and were responsible for was being irrevocably damaged and molded into something you were utterly opposed to.

I don't even have kids, but watching this video, with its sensible, friendly, with-it sounding voice and its depiction of people who are purported to be my fellows, with baby consumers smiling in the backseat, enjoying the warm, light-giving glow that comes from knowing they've just purchased something good....I don't know. I felt like sobbing in failure, picturing my children playing with legos, and watching tv, and seeing those cool looking kids they could relate to, and not even comprehending what they were hearing and what it meant, but having it become an unquestioned preconception, embedded in their spine. That it could possibly be these things that could distance my children from me. That these beliefs would be what set the generation gap between them and me; these could be what they latch on to in their pride that they are young, and I am old, and thus we are simply different.

Maybe I have the soul of a fogey. I try not to be morally outraged by things, because it's usually in bad taste, and it usually says as much or more about me as it does about them.

But if this is where the zeitgeist's mores are at now, I don't really want to even be aware of what they will be by the time I have children and they are old enough to be affected by this.

Guess I won't be getting a TV.