I Cried for the Terminator, but not Cantinflas

I can't possibly have been older than 5 years old when my aunt took me to enjoy Terminator 2 at the cinema in our town in the Dominican. Should a 5-year-old be allowed to enjoy such a violent movie? The truth is that I'm still not fully certain. The only reason I even remember being in the theater is because half-way through the movie I broke down in tears and it left a mark on me.
 
My aunt turned to me and asked me: "What's wrong?""
I wept, "I can't believe that man is letting himself get shot for money." I couldn't even tell the difference between reality and fiction.
 
Yep, I don't know that many Dominicans who pay close attention to movie ratings or anything of the sort. I remember turning on broadcast television back in the mid-90s and stumbling across softcore porn. At around that same time, the famed Mexican comedian Cantinflas died. As a result, his movies were being broadcast in marathon on the country's television networks.
 
 My good friend Tolo and I were enjoying a movie at his house when he said to me, "If he's dead, how can they still be playing his movies?"
I told Tolo: "Don't be stupid, Tolo, they [the actors] put on masks." Tolo's 75-year-old father simply observed our interaction quietly. I presumed that somehow Cantinflas was still alive. We watched anything on TV and imitated a lot of what we saw. I only had a black-and-white television with a few channels of reception back in the Dominican. It wasn't until I arrived in the Bronx at age 9 that I first had unfettered access to my own color TV with a pirated cable box.
 
Instead of imitating the Power Rangers dubbed in Spanish or a Mexican soap opera, I could now enjoy everything that unlimited cable had to offer. Somehow I enjoyed the attention my teachers gave me for being smart and it encouraged me to watch the History channel, the Learning Channel, and the Discovery channel. This was before the History channel descended into aliens and ice truckers. I'm not quite sure what has become of the Discovery channel, but I heard that the Learning Channel had also descended into post-Bush buffoonery. The channels were alright in the 90s.
 
My parents weren't really around for me for a lot of years and oftentimes television was the only thing outside of school raising me. From my perspective, excessive television watching has all come down to what I selected. All of my friends who watched Star Trek made it to college or another post-secondary school. On the other hand, my confidantes who watched BET and MTV are largely still in the Bronx.
 
Should we address the culture of violence that the National Rifle Association complains about? To a certain extent. From my experience, it's all about balance, making sure that kids are exposed to adult opinions and not just adult entertainment. The reality is that schools have not fully adapted to the reality of the 21st century.
 
If schools are supposed to be parental surrogates, shouldn't there be a class teaching kids proper television and Internet etiquette? After all, schools teach students safe sex, driver safety, tool safety, writing, public speaking, as well as physical and intellectual cooperation. Schools, however, don't teach kids to properly handle the media and technology that dominates our century.