I bet your kids or other youths lit up when they read Star Wars in the title. But as positive a phrase that Star Wars may be, there is a negative phrase that outranks it for youth. You guessed it. It is the ‘black and white’ part of the title. I included the phrase in the title to ensure that youths do not read the rest of this post.
Now we can be sad that the youth of the world ignores everything that uses black and white. Just look at the band Bleachers’ three videos released from their album on Youtube. They are I Wanna Get Better, Roller Coaster, and Like a River Runs. The first two videos are in colour and get millions of hits. Like a River Runs is in black and white and since the summer only has tens of thousands of hits. Generally, new bands are listened to by youth and almost to a person, youth will not watch the full video.
I’ve seen adults saddened by the fact that they cannot get their kids to watch classic black and white movies, solely on the basis they are filmed in black and white. The only black and white they will consume is that of still pictures. I bet most youths only spend a few seconds on these in a rush to get to the good colour pictures.
We adults must not be saddened by this. We have been given lemons so now we must make lemonade.
Adults have always tried to keep some things from their kids. My parents both knew how to speak German but kept that language from us kids. Instead, when they needed to communicate to each other but wished the kids couldn’t hear, they simply spoke in German.
Adult society could communicate things to each other but keep these things from their kids. I have already offered up one method of doing this in Cursive Code which could be for local communications. For regional, provincial, national or international communications, I suggest we use the power of television. We could have one all black and white station on the dial.
We could simply act normally in these black and white shows. The black and white will keep 99 % of youth unwilling to watch. But for the secrets we strongly wish to keep, we must dress up in 1950’s outfits and communicate with other adults that way. The combination of black and white and history will keep all youth from even attempting to watch.
In those black and white shows with fifties outfits, we can for instance repeatedly interpret teenage slang and symbols. After all this is the texting age. And we can go over psychological tactics that might get kids to do what we want. As well, new fads could be interpreted for adults in extreme detail.
The Many Rants of Larry Russwurm: keeping youth in the dark since 2014.
