The Decline of Neatness

Summary
In the “The Decline of Neatness,” Norman Cousins claims that the sloppiness virus has expanded all aspects of our society. The virus affect on our sloppy style of dress, slovenly speech, emotionless attitude to violence and brutality and our negative human relationships.

Taking the way what we dress as an example first, sloppy and frayed jeans become a trend in recent times. People think it is fashionable to look disheveled rather than neatness today. However, the author thinks our messy clothing as if we had been stamped out by cookie cutters. Furthermore, the sloppy speech is so common today as well. People like to speak in chopped-up phrases and grunts or chants; they rarely speak in complete sentences. The media like to use some violent and foul words and prefer for the restricted rating than general rating. Thus, they always produce gaudy language and bloody scenes to attract audiences. This mindless violence is desensitizing our children’s feelings.

All the sloppy dress, slovenly speech and emotionless attitude affect our human relationships. Our acceptance of the casual sex has paralyzed our feelings and destroys our privacy. The author hopes that fashion designers and the media producers might show more respect for the human spirit but not pollute children’s genuine creativity.

Reflections
Today is the prosperous media’s generation. It brings lots of convenient benefits and some negative results as well. Media violence becomes a serious problem toward children. School bullying has emerged in an endless time.

Media violence is happened through TV programs, the NEWS, video games and the Internet. These Medias exist everywhere in the daily life, so it’s hard to avoid children contacting with them. TV programs provide children some violent heroes to imitate and these heroes often have some aggressive behaviors. Children may want to the heroes like the actors, so they use the violence to bully other children. They may be misled that such behaviors can make them popular. There are most of fight scenes in the video games. Children gain the achievement by defeat the opponents. These excitements lead to stress and negative feelings of children invisibly. The Internet is the most dangerous area because there are no any restrictions on the information which children absorb.

Parents can encourage children to seek more educational activities to reduce their daily exposure to media as entertainment. And parents have to educate their children that violence can make people lose friends and feel bad. The true heroes mean that people who are courageous and help others. They won’t use violence to solve problems.