If we can't Address the Root of the Problem, then the Pining Populace will Soon Smother this now Persistent Vegetative Planet
This week has been deadly to the consumer: food and oil prices have become the personified price form of a flying super villain trapped in constant motion inertia. And the airlines Delta and Northwest are merging, thus making airfare rise due to less competition, (and making your airplane seats less comfortable.) Then there is everything that happened in months and years past: we have the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the HMOs running away with our money, the rich having cut taxes, a staggeringly high national deficit, defective Chinese toothpaste, wages that are too low to accommodate inflation, no policy to address global warming, and the government pumping money into the fine print-filled public relations stunt of ethanol along with the president's sinking ship that I aptly dub Iraq Occupation III, (the Mongols and English made the same mistake that we did with the same results.)
Aesthetically, everything that I aforementioned seem to be the causes and perpetuators of our societal decline, economic recession, and the looming planetary meltdown of global warming, but they are only the numerous effects and manifestations of a much larger problem, that problem being the corporate control of the country and Americans' antipathetic views of education and the world around us.
The group that transcends all of America's diverse populations is children and teenagers who are affected by the negative stereotypes that are perpetuated in popular culture, thus I will use them as an example of the product of the antipathy epidemic in this country and others. This epidemic is rooted back to the media and lies in the fact that it only cares about ratings. Hence, it preys on impressionable children with comical shows containing "cool" protagonists facing "real" problems with the plot revolving around a media-created stereotype of what children are interested in, and how those interests would coincide with their cognitive abilities. This stereotype can easily be translated to "kids like television and our sponsors' products, thus they have small vocabularies and do not understand things that are in any way above their grade level." For instance, if a prominent children's television show has a protagonist that rides skateboards and hates school, the usual negative cultural and social stereotypes, and a fast-paced plot to keep the sugar-saturated hyperactive children watching, the final result will be that children buy skateboards and dislike school. Thus, if this continues to occur, less children will get into college which will result in less white-collar jobs, more people with wages that cannot accommodate inflation, and less people with the ability to develop alternative fuels to fight the climate crisis. If we are going to address this problem, we need to get more books of intellectual value in the hands of children, increase emphasis on mathematic, literary, historical, and scientific classes in public schools, and increase the prominence of forms of media that are not corporately sponsored.
The media is, of course, not the only cause of antipathy or the long-term effects of the economic recession, it is only the cause that we can most easily change with the changes having a large and potent effect on society.
The immense power and money-hungry nature of corporations is perpetuating all of this, plus the food shortage and current economic recession. If we do not begin to create a non-corporate secular forum and media that will reach people who do not have access to or decide not to use computers, alongside public and political action to combat the lobbyists who are controlling subsidies and government foreign and domestic policy, then a small tax rebate will be all that we get to compensate for all of this country's economic problems.
-The Disciple of Science
