Seeing Violence Harms Children

    Rodney King was beaten by white officers; a white truck driver was thrashed by a group of blacks; David Koresh held a cult vigil in Waco; blacks riot in Los Angels and in Dallas for Rodney King. It seems like all we see in the media today is violence. What is today's society teaching our children?
    The lesson that I see journalists conveying is that violence is wrong, but what about the children who don't know the difference between right and wrong? These young preschoolers and kindergartners are exposed to this type of chaos for four to five hours per day on television.
    Remembering back to when I was that age, the most violence I saw was occasionally in the movies or on an unsupervised television shows, hardly ever in the news. It was easy for me to believe that the people in those shows were just pretending, but children in this day and age are not certain that this type of fighting is made up. Children today see violence in movies, cartoons, television shows, and the news.
    There must be some way for us to convey the message that the type of violence in the news is wrong and the chaos in movies, cartoons, and television shows is fiction.