Anyway, if we’re going to try to make this a kinder, gentler place at some point in the future so we’re not all goin’ crazy or starvin’ to death, I’d be on board with that
Lots of folks my age feel things are going sort of wrong with the raising of children these days. They think young parents aren’t quick enough to impose some sense of discipline on young kids and that large numbers of young children are sort of spoiled beyond belief. Lots of parents these days get accused of “helicopter parenting” and it’s generally a frowned-upon thing and seen as a derogatory expression. There’s sort of a general feeling that younger generations are not mentally tough enough to cope with the way life works. I’ve been pretty guilty of this myself and have been hard on younger parents for not being somehow “tougher” on their kids.
But what if it’s the world or the system that’s wrong – and there’s plenty of evidence to indicate that’s the case. Deaths from drug overdose and suicide are extremely high, sort of out of control among young people, seeming to suggest that these young people really aren’t mentally tough enough to survive in the type of world we’ve built. But what if the type of world we’ve built is a really crappy place and maybe, just maybe, we need to build a kinder, gentler world for young people – or maybe those very young people will be the ones who will help turn this into a kinder, gentler world – and wouldn’t that be nice.
It’s really hard for me to understand the way things work, but it helps to understand the role the media has played in creating the mess we live in. I worked in the media for almost 40 years and feel I have a good understanding of how it works. When I first started in the newspaper business back in the 1970’s, I truly thought that the newspaper I worked at existed mostly to provide information to the people who read it. It was sort of a really hard lesson for me to learn that the news is most certainly “the shit around the ads”, because, although that was a common joke in newsrooms for years, it is also the sad truth. It is exactly the way the news is treated in most media markets. Sometimes it might even seem to be front and centre, but it’s likely not.
The media is not there primarily to provide you with information – it is there to sell you stuff. Mostly it’s there to keep you consuming as fast as you can and with every available dollar you have. Because if you don’t, the whole damned economy will come crashing down double quick – and you can be sure of that. It’s the type of system we’ve built and it keeps us rushing headlong through life chasing some type of golden carrot or golden mushroom or golden I don’t know what. And we are crashing through life so fast these days that almost no one can handle the pressure. There are line-ups to get in to seek mental health help….and as I mentioned earlier, drug overdose and suicide are wildly out of control.
And the type of economic system we’ve built is not just unsustainable because it’s driving us all crazy – except for the people who are starving to death on the planet….it’s also totally and absolutely unsustainable because there are way too many of us living in a place that has finite resources. I know it may seem that we have unlimited resources but that’s not at all true. Almost everything we rely and depend on in our world is a limited resource and if we keep sucking and gouging these resources out of Mother Earth at the rate we are, sooner or later stuff is going to start to run out. You can’t really have a “growth economy” on a planet like ours. It’s why the really rich guys are trying so desperately to get into space – there’s unlimited resources in them thar asteroids.
Anyway, if we’re going to try to make this a kinder, gentler place at some point in the future so we’re not all goin’ crazy or starvin’ to death, I’d be on board with that. I’d be pretty happy if there was some way to prevent people from living in either almost constant physical or emotional fear, or both, I’d vote for that. Problem is they don’t let us vote on stuff like that. They surely do not. The last thing our politicians and governments want to hear are the voices of ordinary people. Who, I think, would generally choose the kinder, gentler world.