STEVE SMITH -- What’s up

It’s a bad time to be a kid.

Hollywood has just admitted that for years it has been systematically

marketing violent images to our children to sell more of their product.

Many of us remember the violent images of our youth as the Road Runner

flattening Wile E. Coyote with a steamroller or flipping the cannon over

to fire the ammunition into Wile E.’s head, which, after the smoke

cleared, resembled a strip of cooked bacon. No matter: four seconds

later, the coyote was back, opening his next shipment from the Acme Corp.

A couple of weeks ago, I took my son, Roy, to the office of Steve

Dunn, the creative director for Perspective, a magazine I am editing.

Steve was working on the images for a story reporting the Federal Trade

Commission’s children and violence study, while I was proofreading the

copy. In the next room, we had put Roy, who is 7, to work on a computer

game called “Bonkers,” in which a gnome was trying to blow up or pound

the living daylights out of furry animals.

Bonkers is a lot different than the real-life violence that has been

foisted upon our children. Still, as despicable as this conspiracy is, it

cannot be executed (no pun intended) without parental complicity. Parents

are not doing an adequate job of screening the TV, movies and video games

seen by their children.

It’s a bad time to be a kid if your parents want to put you in

full-time day care. County funding for one day-care program was just cut

off, affecting a center in Costa Mesa; and the Southcoast Early Childhood

Learning Center has just closed too. The center is the Costa Mesa

day-care center where murderer Steven Abrams ran over two children. There

is a lawsuit pending against the center, which is accused of negligence

in the children’s death. And despite the attorney-speak to the contrary,

the lawsuit is only about money and its toll has forced the center’s

closure. Steven Abrams, not the center, was responsible for the deaths of

those children.

I must admit, however, that these day-care center closings may be a

good thing for some of the kids. Day care used to be a safety net for

parents, now it’s a crutch. Perhaps now a few of the displaced kids will

get to stay home with mom or dad.

It’s a bad time to be a kid if you live on the West Side of Costa

Mesa. There, the Shalimar Learning Center has been closed. The center is

a good idea that should continue for the benefit of these kids. These are

the same kids whose schools reported shockingly low test scores three

years in a row. Those scores were revealed almost three months ago, and

at that time we heard some outrage from board member Martha Fluor, but

nothing has happened since. The Shalimar Learning Center may reopen soon

to help the teens who have fallen behind, but once again the evidence is

clear: The West Side kids don’t matter to the string-pullers in

Newport-Mesa. And I’d love to be proven wrong on this point.

It’s a bad time to be a kid if you play soccer too. At the Farm Sports

Complex on Fairview (an interesting name considering that the only sport

played there is soccer), neighbors have already started complaining about

the noise after less than a month of operation. The noise comes from the

cheering of the teams and crowds, especially at night when the neighbors

are trying to settle in. Let’s see . . . six soccer fields with crowds,

right next to private homes. Welcome to College Park north.

Kids always get the shaft in these situations. They trust adults to

present movies, games and TV shows that are not harmful to their

upbringing, and we cheat them. They trust us to stay home with them after

they’re born, but too many parents choose material possessions instead

and stick kids in full-time day care. Kids become the footballs in our

political and fiscal debates, and because they have no real power, they

are at the mercy of adults who often do not act in their best interest.

There was a time when the best interests of children took precedence

over profits, politics and pettiness. But what we see happening far too

often these days is our kids suffering because adults act like children.

* STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and freelance writer. Readers

can leave a message for him on the Daily Pilot hotline at (949) 642-6086.