YGO Uncensored- Draconmouth: The Thoughts of Jaya Lakshmi

Ah, America. The land of the free and the home of the brave. A world where everyone’s getting fat and few people realize that global warming is a real problem. It also has the greatest gun-death rate out of all the other countries in the world when not engaged in combat. (Iran doesn’t count because the government did most of the executions.)

I love America because I can choose my religion and can vote and because the atmosphere is better than in the other countries I’ve visited. Yet America has had a lot of bloody deaths, pardon the pun. It may have to do with the fact that people drink a lot and have fights and do all sorts of stupid things. Some of it can be attributed to ignorance, like getting pregnant or contracting an STD, but most of it is just plain idiocy. Why would you want to drive when your hands are shaking and you’re speaking with slurred words? Or why would you spend money on an IPod when you need to feed your family? Why would you buy fast food when you have the money to cook healthy meals? Why would you buy Christmas presents for your kids just because they believe in Santa Claus? I mean, it’s one thing to give presents, but you are raising your children to act spoiled. Remember what happened to Veruca Salt.

Our reality shows expand on this point. It’s not just that people are stupid; it’s that people are paid to be stupid. Even American Idol encourages people with good voices to bank their success on three judges who fit three stereotypes instead of seeking scholarship opportunities or participating in a competition where the judges actually give you good advice and don’t make any humiliations or successes public.

There’s a reason why so many comic strips have remained in the business: because people are not brave enough to see what other kinds of humor and comic strips are out there. I understand this up to a point and can only say: Get your butt moving. Things change. The best comic strip in my opinion, Calvin and Hobbes, has not been in a newspaper for over ten years.

What tops it, however, is that America has the most gun violence because we don’t have gun control, YET WE ARE UNWILLING TO ADMIT THIS TO OUR KIDS! I know guns are scary, and yes, they are dangerous in a child’s hands, but honestly, ignorance can and will breed devastating consequences. If kids were more educated about guns, then they would know better than to play around with the metal “toy” that mommy and daddy keep around in the house. My older brother blames this on the parents, but I consider gun education as important as sex education with one rule: don’t trust families. Most parents are working long hours and not going to be able to spend enough time with their kids to educate them on the hard facts of life. And even if they do have time, can we trust parents to have the nerve to talk to kids about these issues? Given by the number of pregnant girls and teens who contract STDs and the accidental shootings, the best answer is no. Therefore, if we teach kids about drugs and sex in school (which my school thankfully did), then we should accordingly teach them about guns and street violence.

The best way to educate most of these kids, who mainly don’t know about sex or marijuana or health or STDs, is through television. What, don’t look surprised. I had a heavy television addiction until my mom put a stop to it in fourth and fifth grade. Ideally all it should take is a puppet show and a few good books. However, in America most houses have televisions. Now most houses have the Internet and IPods, or some sort of mp3 player. Do you really want to rely on the Internet for information on gun control? I don’t think so. And since when do mp3 players carry lectures on gun control? My brother only has lectures from medical school on his laptop. I’m not saying it won’t happen, but at the present it’s highly unlikely. So television is the best option.

What kind of television are we talking about? Surely not dramas like CSI or Grey’s Anatomy, right? What kind of little kindergartner would watch that? No, we’re talking the cartoons that they watch, from the serious Batman series to the humorous Looney Tunes. There’s no hope for Looney Tunes, which almost always relies on gag humor involving anvils and cannons, but I think there could be gun education on Batman and Teen Titans and all those good action shows.

In fact, out of the many DC animated shows and the Marvel and Disney rivals, only one has dealt with gun problems: Static Shock. Now unfortunately finished due to lack of merchandise, the show was about a black kid named Virgil Hawkins who could zap people with his electric fingers, specifically bad guys. The comic book was even edgier, but then again most comic books are edgier than their TV counterparts. However, some things remained. For example:

In the comic book a white guy was bullying Virgil for hanging around a girl he liked. Virgil then decided to buy a gun and shoot him, but his conscience interfered and he threw away the gun. Then the Big Bang occurred and he became Static.
In the show F-Stop was doing more than trying to beat Virgil at school; after a guy named Wade saved him from locker imprints, F-Stop and his cronies cornered the boy and gave him a violent beating. Wade then wanted Virgil in his gang to protect him and gave him a gun. Virgil, shocked because gunfire had killed his mother, threw away the gun as soon as he could. Then the Big Bang occurs and he becomes Static.

The key difference is that while Virgil is shown as a better person in the show who would never shoot a bully, the show took a bigger risk than the comic did by depicting gangs and beatings. They didn’t actually show F-Stop kicking Virgil’s solar plexus, but it still shocked me.

It wasn’t just the pilot episode. There was another episode titled “Jimmy” which specifically related to guns. The title character had his own bully while Virgil tried to help him. However, this bully torments Jimmy so that the victim steals his father’s gun and threatens to shoot him. Virgil’s friend Ritchie convinces him that it’s not worth it, but then the bully’s friends tackle Jimmy, which make him shoot Ritchie. At the very end was a public statement on how many kids got expelled or died from gunshots and what to do if you’re in Virgil’s shoes. If I recall, that episode won an Emmy award. The show up to its last episode made reference to harsh real facts in our world, like mental illness, how we can never bring back the people we loved from the dead (Virgil almost succeeded, which made his failure more devastating), how our brothers and sisters can be the biggest dumb butts in the world no matter how hard we try, and how no one likes bossy girls.

Here is the ultimate irony: we may be one of the most violent countries, but we are afraid to show real guns on animated shows. Instead, we have laser guns or we eliminate them if we’re dubbing Japanese anime. I could go on and on, but I’d rather move on. We have the Columbine shootings. We then have Bowling for Columbine, a Michael Moore documentary. What did the MPAA give this movie? R! I haven’t seen the whole movie, but from what I saw, a PG-13 would have been more appropriate. The only actual shootings were in the South Park short and in a target course. (Fahrenheit 911 deserved an R at least because it showed a lot of dead bodies and amputees.) Why would the MPAA give such a high rating? Were they worried about the parents who would storm in and demand an R? Would Columbine parents complain? Was the release date too close to the incident? Damn, it’s no wonder people are so stupid in America, myself included; no one gives us a chance when we’re young to display our intelligence and bravery over these issues. I think that every kid should go see Bowling for Columbine and receive a thorough education on guns. Someone told me that Moore doesn’t have legitimate arguments and they’re probably right; however, that doesn’t stop all the information nuggets that he puts into his movies.

With all this talk about guns, it’s only natural that we make our way to “death”. Yes, the d word (and the k word) is no longer allowed on television shows that are animated. Teen Titans couldn’t even use it, which not only prohibited Slade from using his mercenary name Deathstroke, but also led to phrases like “destroy the Teen Titans”. I only recall Starfire using it once, and she was referring to friendship. The Batman can’t use it either, which is even more ridiculous since Bruce Wayne donned the cape after a robber shot his parents and Dick Grayson became Robin after Tony Zucco sabotaged his parents’ trapeze. I give Warner Brothers credit for showing a funeral and all, but “die” and “kill” are three-letter words, just like “war”, “sex” and “hell”. Should we eliminate “war”, “sex” and “hell” from our vocabulary? Gee, we’re becoming the world that George Orwell predicated in 1984; we’re eliminating words simply because of their meanings and so we don’t have to think about them! Similarly, “death” is a five-letter world, along with “devil” and “knife”. I know that some parents banned a Jane Yolen book because it had “Devil” in the title. Stupidity, it’s stupidity. If they want to ban something, how about “no more girls in skimpy costumes when they’re fighting bad guys”? That might contribute to American women’s self-esteem. Or how about we say “no more senseless violence unless it contributes to a story”? Then maybe we wouldn’t have stupid tussles over pizza or the remote. Maybe even “no more mindless television that does not make us think”? That way we won’t breed American people to be stupid.

This is an ironic editorial to write since it’s December (as of this writing), supposedly the month of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and “the most wonderful time of the year” according to a song we sang in chorus. However, I’m a pessimistic person. I don’t believe that children should fuss more over Christmas presents than about the poverty in our country; if you must, then limit the fun to one day at the most. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the people who dominated the city were people that let screens hypnotize them. A bomb killed these people in one blow. Are we going to become like the people in Fahrenheit?