Tag Archives: Corporate Propaganda

World news and the everyday teenager

Posted on by
2

There wasn’t any conversation to speak of on the drive to school today, so I turned on the news. From the back a teen immediately interjected “Is that completely necessary?”

I muted the sound and turned around, completely incredulous. “What?”

“Is that completely necessary?” she repeated without a hint of what I hoped to have been mischievous insolence.

“Not really.” Is all I could muster as I turned the volume back up and refocused my attention. I can’t say that listening to corporate propaganda is necessary, or even a good idea. But I am at an equal loss for how else to stay tuned to what’s happening around us. It’s a good thing my honest ambivalence tripped up the teaching moment I might have offered.

There are probably far too many ways to get entangled in current affairs, but for children with school, sports, video games, television, play, music and the odd meal, there is no break for non-academic reality. One might argue that kids could be spared the complications of the world outside. I can hardly see the merit to that school of unthought. Especially as domestic politics have certainly invaded their education, the piss-poor vocational experience few are willing to admit that American schools have become.

This drive-time comment came after an evening spent not being forced to attend a journalist’s lecture last night. It was off-putting enough to have to wait in the atrium apparently. Although, as dense as the economic principles might have been, I sorely regretted that all of the kids, especially the girls, had not witnessed Naomi Klein, about as apt a role model as any young woman could dream.

So what if much would be above their head? Won’t they grow into it? Are there realities too shocking for children? Shouldn’t our challenge be to address those horrors, sooner than shield ourselves by pretending they do not exist? What a luxury that our children have even the choice to know how they are impacted.

It’s one thing to expose kids to pictures of highway accidents, or television programs about serial killers, quite another in my opinion to complicate their understanding of societal malevolence. Can they not gleam from parental example that such obstacles do not render life hopeless? We cope. We blot out certain realities to pamper our own delusions. Is that a difficulty level beyond young people?

There’s no doubt a fine line about forcing experiences on children, the morning news for example, but isn’t that to pretend that almost all their indoctrination isn’t involuntary? Can you think of any accomplished person who wasn’t pushed?

We can be thankful our children aren’t experiencing household raids, aerial bombings, and marketplace bombers which take the lives of their friends and relatives. How sheltered do children need to be? Even if their Social Studies will eventually teach them Zinn or Chomsky, aren’t the lessons sabotaged by the context of isolation? How are children really to learn that they aren’t working in factories but for blood spilled by labor unions; that their grandparents aren’t destitute or dead owing to collective efforts which demanded more from their government? Pop culture has already lulled kids to the politics of nothing matters. Is there any wrong time to try to right that lie? Or do YOU believe that individuals have no power to participate in the global community?

The bizarre UNICEF report about children’s health

Posted on by
Reply

The corporate propaganda machine has been working full blast to convince the public that worldwide children are doing better than ever before! Oh how much progress we are making so goes their chime. As usual, the UN is the fountain of this sort of idiotic ‘positive thinking’ passing itself off as real fact.

This of course goes entirely counter to what Americans know, but a lie, especially a statistical lie, repeated over and over sounds so convincing. Only 10,000,000 kids per year are dying before they reach 5 y/o? Oh how cheering, right? Instead of around 13,000,000 kids dying as in 1990, now they say only 10,000,000 per year die. We’re saving lives, oh yes!

Isn’t this sort of nonsense obscene? 1990 was the time of the dismantling of the social security network of the former Soviet Union. Living standards plummeted for several hundred million. What a base level to now start claiming that great strides in world public health are supposedly now being made. Sure they are….

This report is utter nonsense as it claims great strides are being made yet admits that half the developing world lives without any basic sanitation. And 1,000,000,000 of the world’s population lives on less than $1 per day. Does that seem like a world where solely 10,000,000 kids before age five are losing their lives unnecessarily? Common sense would dictate that that is a totally false and misleading measurement of the numbers.

Liars have so much money to spread their lies with. And those who try to counter the piles of propaganda have so little. Don’t buy such obvious bullshit saying that the world is getting better, when it obviously is not. Even if they repeat this sort of crap over and over and over….

Not only is it not getting better for children these days, we might not even have a world left for them in a generation or two. If we do, it might have hardly any wild animals left alive, and it is likely to be a planet where pollution causes disease everywhere for everybody.

Thank you United Nations for trying to pretend otherwise for the benefit of the super rich who want all to think the present world is just peachy keen. I would expect nothing less from such a US government controlled institution. That is the job of the UN… to massage, message, and manipulate. Save the children because certainly the UN is not going to be doing that by their constant cleanup operations in support of the Pentagon, and with their fudging and fiddling with statistics.