lastwords

December 2007

Training Them Early
by Randy Salzman/salz@rocketmail.com

eightyone lastwords december 2007Take a look at these adorable toys. Do your kids or grandkids have something similar?

Now, think a tad about the implications. These photos illustrate that we’re training our very youngest to disregard any rational usage of any world resource. These cute toys are the assurance that in America’s craze to purchase and consume, we start our children off very, very wrong.

In spite of the obvious – like America’s burning of gasoline is forcing our soldiers to fight in parts of the world that still have oil – before our kids can walk we begin to convince them they should never have to. And while we complain non-stop about the commercialization of Christmas and the horrors of the selling season, we put the utensil for shopping in front of them the minute they stand on their hind legs.

eightyone lastwords december 2007 2America is engaged in resource battles around the planet, losing badly to China who has sucked up long-term contracts for mining oil, iron, uranium, magnesium and copper from Canada, the Sudan and Australia. Then, unfettered by many environmental restrictions, the Chinese turn those resources into crap for Americans to “need.” We have convinced our very young that the way to happiness is to buy.

While it’s easy to look for someone else to blame – grandparents, friends at the baby shower, advertisers, politicians, salesmen – it’s really time we looked in the mirror and, as Peter Whybrow explains in his 2005 book “American Mania: When More is Not Enough,” recognize that we’re seeing the real problem.

As “Affluenza: The All Consuming Epidemic,” told us in 2001, 93 percent of teenage girls recently listed shopping as their favorite activity with only five percent saying “helping others.” In 1967 two-thirds of American college students found “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” “very important” while one third indicated “making a lot of money.” Those figures have since reversed.

In 1950, the average new home contained less than 1,000 square feet. Today, it’s over 2,300, while the average size of American families has declined by almost a full person. America has so “democratized luxury” – in marketer Michael Silverstein’s term – that, like Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, we need space to store all the things we don’t use.

By the end of this decade, marketing for kids is expected to reach $1 trillion – yes, with a T – after doubling every year in the 1990s. In a Sears ad, singer Maia Campbell already provides this uplifting message for pre-teens: “You gotta believe in your dreams. You gotta stand up for yourself. You gotta be there for your friends. But, hey, first you gotta have something to wear. You gotta have the clothes.”

We’d like to think the future is bright but, according to Monitoring the Future, a 30- year research project at the University of Michigan that looks at attitudes of high school seniors, this rising tide of materialism has led to a “clear decline” in conservation behavior among the young. America’s youngsters, the research indicates, believe that saving the planet is someone else’s job; their job is driving to the mall full-speed ahead without a thought that some of their classmates will soon be headed “over there” to secure oil.

The inconvenient truth, the MTF authors conclude, is that at least through 2006 America’s teenagers’ “willingness to conserve gas, heat and energy has taken a precipitous plunge since the 1980s.”

The ‘80s, of course, are remembered as the days of the “Me” generation and the birth of the catch phrase “greed is good.”

Whybrow, a UCLA psychiatrist and biobehavioral scientist, argues that most of today’s stress and emotional trauma grow from a human body that nature designed for periods of scarcity conflicting with a mindset now trained for 24/7 purchasing. Working from hundreds of American survey projects, medical research, human race and location differences and primate laboratory studies, he argues convincingly that Affluenza is literally killing us, mentally and physically.

“Ironically, we are better tuned physiologically to face the privations and dangers inherent in an unexpected terrorist attack than we are to endure the relentless propositions and stressful abundance of our consumer society,” Whybrow writes. “It is in this blind pursuit of material prosperity that Americans have begun to push the boundaries of human adaptation, as is evidenced by rising levels of greed, anxiety, and obesity.”

With the season of greed upon us – and starting every year earlier and earlier – let’s try to remember that Christmas marketers sell because it’s their job. They go after the kiddies because kiddies go after parents and parents, guilt-ridden for our failures to be perfect, go after our credit cards.

Let’s make a change this year. Let’s listen to our own economic philosophy – the one that proclaims “let the buyer beware” – and do our job.

And sometimes our job, to steal another phrase from the 1980s, is to “Just say No.”

A former journalism professor, Randy Salzman lives in Charlottesville.