My Moral Upbringing

Along with my parents, friends, my church and my primary and secondary school systems, I'd like to thank the following for my moral development:

Sally Struthers

Early Transformers cartoons

Early GI Joe cartoons

M.A.S.K.

Early Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons

and other cartoons that had morals at the end and daytime infomercials that informed us children of the evils and misfortunes in the world. Does the TV of today provide the moral backbone to our children the way that '80s did?

I'd also like to thank the Boston (and worldwide) hardcore and straightedge scenes for some conservative yet libertarian and socialist tinges. Boston 'zines, like The Pit Report and Lollipop, also deserve some credit, too.

Thanks to the techno and rave scenes for PLUR, which includes hyperreal.org, Usenet newsgroups and the Northeast and Boston rave e-mailing lists.

I also have George Orwell, Henry David Thoreau, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Terence McKenna. Unfortunately, Robert Heinlein doesn't enter the picture until later in my high school years.

Douglas Adams probably helped a little, too, but I think he's more responsible for teaching me not to take things too seriously.

And how could I forget Doctor Who?

This post doesn't come out of nowhere. It just has an obscure connection to my bachelors project and a lot of discussions that I've had lately about "this generation. . .," people talking about their self-made immigrant ancestors, reading Emile Durkheim's The Division of Labor in Society and trying to get a better understanding of the between the Transcendentalists with their Unitarian predecessors, German Romanticism and pietism.

This is part of the reason that I've become something of a hermit. . ..