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"You look beautiful!" How many times have we said that to our children? The words may vary slightly, sometimes based upon their sex or sometimes in context of the occasion. We as parents view our children through the glasses of complete and unconditional love. But could we be perpetuating the priority of beauty over substance which exists in our society by expressing our emotions in such a form?

We all love to complain about the society today, how it lacks meaning and how your ability or talent in anything does not have a lot to do with how notorious, a/k/a famous, you are. Paris Hilton, whose only claim to fame is wealth and bad choices, rates as the #1 photographed celebrity. The show "I Love New York," based not upon the city so nice they named it twice, but on the extreme antics of a girl nicknamed "New York," whose arrogance and brashness was so antagonistic to audiences when she appeared on the reality show "Flava of Love" that ratings soared; and since ratings and money are all that really matter in television, she promptly secured the right to her own show. Talent? Perhaps they have talent if talent involves the ability to bring the memory of a nail running down a chalkboard to life. But aren't our choices in moving these people to the front of our water cooler and dinner table conversations really promoting their importance in the eyes of our children?

Before you roll your eyes when I begin, "When I was a child," try to remember what dinner conversations used to involve. When I was a child, (sorry), dinner discussions were on the race to the moon or Vietnam. Perhaps there was the occasional reference to Marilyn Monroe in the 50s and 60s, or the antics of Mick Jagger or Elton John in the 70s, but the encroachment of the press into every lurid detail of the lives of famous people has uncovered more dirt than we really need to know; it's a "too much information" world out there and bad press is better than no press. Society on a whole is more concerned with Danny Devito's self admitted drunken antics than the progress in the war in Iraq, (okay, "Operation Iraqi Freedom".) I find myself going with the flow in choosing light conversational choices over stuff that matters. Little research is needed to laugh about whether Paula Abdul was high or drunk or simply tired; it is much harder to build a foundation for a meaningful discussion on the very real global warming trend.

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