I just happened to stumble upon an old Adam 12 episode on television the other night. In it, a “good kid” got busted for shoplifting and his father came to bail him out. The father tried to be understanding and supportive and the kid said “Dad, get mad at me!” The father said, “I’m not going to hit you,” and the kid said, “You should hit me. That’s the problem.”
Now Adam 12 was a Jack Webb TV show. Jack had an ultra-conservative view of life, including his belief that society in the late 1960s had spared the rod and spoiled the child. Thus the very unconvincing dialogue of the child wanting his parent to hit him.
(As the survivor of a parent who occasionally beat me for transgressions, I can tell the kid that getting hit is no solution.)
Today such dialogue wouldn’t get past the censor. We know that violence toward kids is no casual matter, and that discipline based on hitting a child is ineffective. If anything, it makes the child himself more violent.
At the time, though, I’m sure a lot of the viewers nodded knowingly and said, “yeah, he should have hit the boy to keep him out of trouble.”
Time, that rascal, has made that episode of Adam 12 a relic of the old beliefs. We see it now and we cringe.
Time is cruel and unforgiving. The long speeches of Jack Webb on Dragnet in which he excoriates the demon weed now sound like comedy monologues. As more and more states–even red conservative states–legalize marijuana, Webb’s screeds about how weed is a gateway drug and there’s no such thing as a quick one before I go, that the whole purpose of weed is to get high, etc etc,–well, those long speeches have gone beyond obsolete. They’re ridiculous.
As a writer, I worry that some of my attitudes might be rendered ridiculous by time. I have some safety, in that much of my Minerva series takes place in the early 60s. Some of my characters have to express foolish or arrogant attitudes toward persons of color, or LGBTQ folks, or women. It was a part of that time and I can’t rewrite history so that everyone is enlightened.
Still, as a white man who grew up in that time, I worry that subconsciously I will throw some stupid comment which will ruin the whole work. All the apologizing in the world won’t cure that.
Time is making the human race a little smarter on these things. Some of the human race. Some of us are still mired in 1950, thinking we’re on an episode of Adam 12 spouting the “old fashioned values” of beating children and criminalizing cannabis and wondering why the world is so confusing.
As for myself, I have first readers who will point out when I am making a stupid male comment about women or when I write something inappropriate. I need help with this, not because I am sexist and anti-gay but because I grew up in a world that was. Ridding myself of the old attitudes has been a slow process, one that is still evolving. To you, dear reader, who grew up with Barak Obama and Rachel Maddow, it seems simple. People are people. Respect them and write them as human beings.
And it should be that simple. Time keeps dragging me into evolving. I don’t protest the dragging. I protest my own stupidity.
But at least I never wrote a line in which a child wishes his dad had beat him. I got that going for me.
Mark Bruce, Writer 