Sorry Big Bird: Bush cuts PBS budget by 25%

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$114 of the $460 million budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been cut in the 2007 budget. We live in a world of 24×7 TV with most of that content not wholesome. Of course you have your cartoons. Coked up-looking animals that attack each other, Power Rangers (more violence), and then there’s good old fashioned degenerate cartoons.

I grew up on Electric Company and Sesame Street. Even if I didn’t learn my alphabet from TV, I learned that there is such a thing as calm stimuli-free TV. Now that seems counter-intuitive. How can TV be stimuli-free. Well it doesn’t cause me to start jittering, jump up and smack my brother, or otherwise act a fool. That’s what I mean. So yes, it did stimulate but in a positive way.

If there’s any public entity that I’d support it would be PBS. Sure X-Men was cool, but Wolverine never taught me how to connect C with A with T to form the word cat. If there was some mangling to be done, I’d give Wolverine a buzz. If I needed a terror camp destroyed, G.I. Joe was never too far away. I always came back to PBS at some point though.

It greatly hurts to see a great institution, a worthwhile investment seeing its budget cut. What message does this make? Education is not that important? Education is important in all its forms: the classroom, peer-to-peer social interactions, as well as entertainment.

Generations from now it will become even easier to cut education. A generation taught by example that it is not that important will learn to lose value for it. While other nations begin to Prosper on the backbone of education, knowledge, and open communication others will decay in its absence.