LLT: Don't Demoralize the Public

Last night, Barry Ritholtz and I stood on the side of the set as Larry Kudlow opened his show with a segment about the FCC and censorship of the airwaves. Several times in the discussion, Larry asked why, regardless of whether the FCC has the right or not to censor, CBS is putting a show on that entails teen orgies in the first place.

It got me thinking: why do I cuss on my blog?

After the dude from the Ayn Rand Institute's commentary (a not for profit institute, I might add, which makes it one of the single most hypocritical institutions in the history of hypocrisy) one of the points I wanted to make during that discussion was that, by far, the most popular sites on the Internet are indeed sites like aol.com, yahoo.com, google.com, cnn.com and so on, none of which stray very far from what most Americans (including the FCC) would consider decent.

Larry's comments made me think back to when I was playing high school basketball and my coach's son would be around us players all the time. I loved -- heck, love -- that kid to this day. But I remember I sometimes would feel ashamed when I'd cuss in front of him. I don't cuss in front of kids. More to the point, I've long argued that, unless it's personal in nature, anything you say you should be able to say in front of anyone -- kids, your girlfriend's mom, whomever. You know what I mean? I usually say that to people when they use a racial slur in front of me: "Hey, that's cool if you want to say that. But I hope that I don't accidentally call you out about it next time we're playing hoops in Harlem."

So the more I thought about Larry's point that we "shouldn't demoralize the public", the more I got to thinking that there's not much reason to cuss on my blog. At least not unless there's an actual point to the cussing itself. It's not like I can't keep it clean and still make all my points.

So that's this week's Life Lesson Thursday. And yes, I know it's Friday. But I couldn't get back to write this last night, as I had a business dinner straight from the studio.

And technically, this could be considered the FIRST ever pure Life Lesson THURSDAY. Because I LEARNED this one just yesterday. On Thursday. LLT indeed.