I had a long talk with my children today. My wife and I have 4 kids. We are a "yours, mine, and ours" kind of family.
We're upper-middle class, educated professionals. I'm 51 and I trade and do trading related programming for a living. My wife is 47 and a relatively senior exec at ATT. We are FAR, Far, far away from being the 20ish, wild-eyed, extreme blogger types depicted in the traditional media.
Our kids range from a High School Senior son to a 4th grade elementary school daughter. We have 3 sons within 6 years of being drafted if a draft was reinstituted.
President Bush says that we're fighting the moral and political equivalent of Totalitarianism/Communism/Fascism today. If I believed that, I'd offer up all three of my sons to serve their country. I'd try to enlist too.
But he is a well documented liar and I will refuse to offer up my son's to fight needless wars for any President, Democrat or Republican, who is such a well documented and proven incompetent liar.
So I had a talk with the whole family today about all the Disney shows we love. My daughter is the one most impacted by this. One of her favorite shows is "That's so Raven." It turns out that I also like that show after watching it with my daughter a few times. My daughter likes the fact that I'll watch that show with her. I'm a "sing in the shower kind of person" and I'm only just a little shy about admitting that I've been caught belowing out the "That's so Raven" theme more than just a few times.
But I explained to my family and to my daughter today what Disney and ABC were about to do. That they were going to tell conscious and deliberate lies to the American people about the tragic events of 911. I told them that the reason Disney was telling these lies in their movie had to do with the fact that it wanted to influence people to vote a certain way in the upcoming election. All my kids thought that this was wrong.
I explained that the only power our family had to fight this kind of thing was to stop watching ABC and Disney for as long as it took for them to understand that they shouldn't do this. I told them that I didn't know whether we would succeed in convincing Disney or not but that we had to try to do it in order to demonstrate that we didn't want to be lied to and to try to make sure that American democracy worked.
My daughter asked if this meant we couldn't watch "Cheetah Girls 2" which we had already used our Satellite TV recorder to tape. I told her that it would be ok to watch that recording for as long as she wanted. (My daughter loves taping these Disney movies and watching them quite a few times. Disney is her favorite channel.)
But if the reports are true that Disney is going ahead with this 911 TV movie which insults it's customers (like us) with lies, then, I guess my family will have no choice but to let the powerful and wealthy Disney company know that we won't tolerate this kind of lying interference in our democracy.
Who's with us?
What other families are ready and willing to give up "That's so Raven" and "Suite Life of Zach and Cody" and "Phil of the Future" and "Hanna Montana" and, well, all the TV shows produced by the Disney company that would lie to the American people about their political history?