Teach Your Children Well
It doesn’t take much to get me upset. I pick up a paper (that is, if I’m feeling old fashioned) scan a story almost at random, and just like that I am whining or seething or formulating a counterargument faster than my brain can move. More often than not, I am firmly convinced that I have quite a bit more that the slightest idea I know what I am talking about. Usually–sometimes it takes a half a day or so–I realize that whatever thoughts I had formulated or, God forbid, spoken aloud, were off base or stupid or nothing different than anyone randomly selected from the general population could have come up with.
But there are those rare occasions when I read something and experience that visceral feeling, when I rant and rave and what I say is true–it’s just got to be. Case in point: In today’s New York Times, there is an article about entrepreneural kids called “Barons Before Bedtime” (January 25, 2007). Penelope Greene, the writer of the article, reports that
“For some time now, teenagers have been looking to entrepreneurs as pop icons — whether Gates or Trump — as much as they have to rock stars and athletes. Having your own business has become very cool; having your own business before your 20th birthday indescribably so.”
I do not have kids of my own, but when I read that I began to seethe. Words, phrases, objections–everything crowded into my cramped head. Some of this stuff was platitudinous–there’s more to life than money. Okay, all of it was platitudinous. That said, isn’t there more to life than money? Isn’t there more to repsect in another human being than his/her ability to make money? What are you going to do, you young go getter kids, when you get your money? How many vehicles will you need? How big will that TV screen need to be? How many gadgets will you have to have? It is a truism in America that everything is worth having for the sole reason that it is produced and effectively marketed. It is also true that, to paraphrase Aristotle, the unmediated life is not worth living. What kind of lives have we created for ourselves? With these screen savvy, business obsessed kids, how worse will it be ten or twenty years from now? I don’t think it will be “very cool,” but then again, I’m about twenty years too old for even fitting into the general demographic of those Americans who have the greatest possibility of being “cool.”
So, you can see that this article really made me cook. And then, I read this:
“’These kids want to make money,’ said Atoosa Rubenstein, 35, the former editor in chief of CosmoGirl, which she founded when she was 26, and Seventeen magazine. ‘They are being marketed to all the time, and they get what marketing is all about.’”
Rubenstein finds nothing troubling about this phenomenon. She seems to applaud young kids for their initiative, their ability to recongnize just how a consumer society works. The kids get what marketing is about. They have to because in America marketing is the meaning of life. Sell, sell, sell. Buy, buy, buy. And when you need a little quiet time away from the dog-eat-dog world, there’s always your 52 inch plasma screen, with surround sound, for a little piece of mind.
I’m not off base or stupid. Not on this one, I’m not. I may, however, be guilty of being derivative in my analysis. But that doesn’t mean what I say is untrue.