Letters to Ukraine – 28

What does popular culture encourage in children? A profound development of the whole person? Hardly. Our media are besotted with [reader: enter a celebrity of your choice here] over any latter-day Mother Teresa or Luther King, whilst commerce exploits children to access parental income. Free-market capitalism, we’re told, possesses an ‘invisible hand’ that benefits all: unfortunately, unencumbered self-interest begets more losers than winners, those losers rarely becoming the TV celebs youngsters emulate. If ostentatious wealth ‘liberates’ a few, it’s mostly gained at the cost of those who mostly create it, for whom the invisible hand can become an iron fist (Third World debt and Climate Change provide further slaps in the face). Many children desire riches and fame; but getting rich doesn’t require talent or sustained effort, nor even that you generate wealth. Capitalism is no meritocracy. It may reward hard-nosed entrepreneurialism but is indifferent to hard-working service. The young sense this: with the very concept of poverty conditioned by affluence, having no car or flat screen TV can make them feel ‘poor’ relative to an imagined norm. Don’t we all become impoverished whenever that flat screen or car radio highlights to the young not the dedicated nurse or cleaner but a highly-paid mediocrity?

© Mario Petrucci, 2013