I was watching Moe pull Larry around by his nose with a pair of pliers when my mother laid down the law. The Three Stooges were banned at the Mack house. I really didn’t understand why. “I don’t want you and your brother hitting each other with hammers like those idiots.” I resented her use of the term idiots. They were, by their own admission, knuckleheads and lamebrains but her use of the term idiots was clearly meant as an insult.

My brother and I never did engage in any hammer fights or nose pulling mainly because hitting each other elicited no hollow coconut sounds, just crying and yelling for “MOM!” All of which leads me to think that my mother was overreacting to the level of violence I was viewing on our 20-inch diagonal black and white TV. She must have read an article about it in Reader’s Digest that day.

I offer up this little nostalgic nugget because I am wondering how much of an impact media violence has on young impressionable minds. Tom & Jerry being hit with anvils, blowtorched and blasted with a shotgun still get a laugh from my 3-year-old nephews. But is it harming them? We live in a time where cold-blooded violence seems to be on the rise. Some people believe that society’s moving away from traditional values is to blame. Folks tend to forget that the “old school” values allowed for repression of minorities and the treatment of women and children as property.

In fact, violence toward those groups was considered acceptable in the good old days. I remember my father telling me how his father used to handle his misbehavior. It involved taking the belt out of his pants and raising some welts. There is no doubt that my old man got the belt but he never used it on his kids.

The Stooges have nothing on CNN. The 24-hour news machine loves to cover violence. The more outrageous and cold-blooded the act, the more coverage it gets. We watch it to try to make some sense of the most senseless acts.

What would make a mother drown her own kids? What would drive a man to murder his pregnant girlfriend? The answers are usually disappointing because the motivations behind the evil are so “ordinary.” Post-partum depression. Jealousy. He was afraid his wife would find out. We often track this stuff to see that justice gets served and that the perpetrator is punished. But I think we lose sight of the other eyes and ears that are taking this all in.

I look at the amount of violence the average child is exposed to in 2008. He or she has over 100 channels of high definition, full color mayhem to passively absorb. While we adults are being entertained by shows like “CSI” or “Desperate Housewives,” the kids are trying to get a fix on what the real world is about. If television is a window on the world then what does that child see? A lot of guns and a lot of explosions. A lot of “bling,” and a lot people unhappy with their bodies, their houses, their lives. A lot of pills.

Pills for being too tired or not being tired enough or having twitchy legs. One thing they will not see is anything resembling healthy relationships between people because that doesn’t make for good TV. Good TV shocks people because that is the only way to keep their attention long enough to sell them stuff. And it is getting harder to shock people. The ante is always going up.

I’ve been around for a while. I know the real world looks nothing like “The Real World” but a 10-year-old is putting these images together to form an idea of what the world outside of his backyard is like. He thinks about what he needs to do to live in that world and if I were that 10-year-old I would be thinking that it is one mean world out there.

To survive in that world, I would have to be just as tough and mean, meaner than Moe ever thought of being.

Mike Mack is a Windham resident and a regular contributor to the American Journal’s sister publication, the Lakes Region Weekly.