Our generation is in serious trouble if today’s reality shows are any indication of today’s youth. Shows like MTV’s the Hills and My Super Sweet Sixteen are showing young people of America as spoiled rich kids who could care less about real issues like poverty and crime. Even shows like the Real World encourage young people to go out, drink and act irresponsibly just for the sake of entertainment.

Sure MTV makes an effort to act like they care by featuring political issues in short MTV news briefs that last no longer than two minutes but the truth is MTV will show reruns of the more entertaining, more misbehaving, shows all day long and only feature campaign updates for a mere 30 seconds a day.

Even the Oxygen channel is downing its rep by jumping on the people doing terrible things bandwagon with their reality show Bad Girls, in which the whole basis of the program is to show girls behaving badly. Is it just me or is this trend a little overwhelming?

What happens when all we see when we turn on the TV is a bunch of young people acting without consequences and doing absolutely nothing to make themselves a valuable asset to our community?

Then everyone wants to become that way. When MTV’s primary viewers are as young as 12 years old, maybe they should try a little harder to put people on TV who are actually doing something with their lives other than getting rich from a reality show.

The Hills’ character Heidi is going public saying she’s voting for John McCain trying to make it seem like she’s doing her political responsibility by voting, yet we learn that she hasn’t even registered to vote. What kind of a role model is that?

And MTV seems to be leading this trend. What happened to why MTV orginally got started? You know for music. Now it’s all reality shows. Maybe they should try and get back to their roots.

They’ve just started a new season of the Real World and surprise, surprise, it takes place in Hollywood, California and all its cast members have dreams of becoming famous. Don’t get me wrong, there are celebrities out there who use their fame for good and actually give back to the world, like Angelina Jolie, who is a UN peace ambassador. The real truth though is that there are a lot better things a person could do with their life than become famous.

What happened to the good days when the cast of the Real World weren’t picked because of how many fights they could get into but for their actual admirable attributes, like in the third season in 1994 when one of the cast members used the show as a platform to speak to young people about the AIDS epidemic. Now there’s a reality show using fame for a good cause. But now almost 15 years later you would think we’ve come a long way but actually we’ve taken a step backwards.

I thought of the easiest solution to this problem with TV. Let’s start giving the kids around us someone they can really look up to so that they have less a chance of being influenced by these awful television shows.