Parents thwarted by Big Tobacco, Big Cable.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

I feel so useless.

It finally has dawned on me that my wife and I have no real influence over our children. The effort we have made over the past 16 years to instill some common sense and moral direction in our kids has been futile.

Not that they've done anything wrong _ yet. But it's obviously just a matter of time before "Jackass," Joe Camel and "Doom" push them over the edge into juvenile delinquency, addiction, violence or worse.

From now on, the best course of action would seem to be lawsuits against all the forces in society that have conspired to prevent us from raising the kind of kids we had hoped to raise.

My kids don't smoke yet, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time. How can they resist the insidious lure of those professional liars at Big Tobacco, with their cool cartoon characters and their free Frisbees and fanny packs?

We must keep suing them and suing them until we've taken all of Big Tobacco's money and given it to high school kids to make anti-smoking TV ads. (At least, I think they're anti-smoking ads. I'm not hip enough to understand them, but I'm sure my kids get the message.)

My kids haven't shot up a school yet, but how much longer can they resist? After all, they've played video games, and some of them were violent. And even though they don't have "Doom," those games are all alike. My kids can't be expected to tell the difference between an animated character on a computer monitor and a real person.