Shop 'Til You Drop All Disturbing Thoughts From Your Mind

Recently there has been a lot of discussion on the ACME email list about Miss Teen South Carolina and her inarticulate response to a question about why some Americans can't find America on a map.

(You can see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WALIARHHLII)

This got me to revisit something I wrote a few years ago. I think it's still relevant:

Its a Tuesday afternoon in March and I’m teaching a media literacy course at a small New England Unversity.

My class is a group of about 25. They are fairly lively and involved students as these things tend to go.

In order to make a point about the trivial subjects the mainstream media often focus on, I show a clip from a local TV news broadcast that devoted almost eight minutes to a segment on the “grand” opening of a new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop and the excitement it was generating among residents of the town.

I contrast this to a series of events that have unfolded in Iraq over the previous few weeks, none of which received much notice in television news, local or otherwise.

I think I am getting my point across, I see a few students nodding their heads, and most of them are not soaking their desks with drool as they catch a quick nap.

Then one young man asks me what the fuss is all about. He says he would rather hear about where to get a good doughnut than about the war.

I stop. I’m not sure what to say in response. (That in itself makes this a not ordinary day.)

I ask him to explain.

He says the doughnut is relevant to his life and the war just isn’t.

What can I say?

I’ve been a college instructor since 1996. Before that I worked in a shelter for abused, neglected and runaway teenagers for almost thirteen years. I have three kids. I like Green
Day. Although I am in my forties I should know something about what American youth are thinking about.

I teach now at a university which is just a couple of minutes from a mall. I see them come and go talking of Donatella (Versace). This is the stereotype isn’t it? The kids who live only for material gratification. There is a story (apocryphal?) at my previous university about the student who transferred to another institution because, she said, the shopping in the other region was better.

I see them. I see them with their Louis Vuitton purses and their Juicy sweatpants. I see them with their shiny clean, look-like-they’ve-never-been-worn-Nikes. I see them in their Gap hoodies, speeding out of the parking lot in Daddy’s SUV. Hey, they are only doing their duty. What did my president tell me after 9/11? Shop or the terrorists win.

If nothing else, the youth of today are obedient. This is what we get when we teach our children to be consumers first and citizens... never. Those who feared the upheaval of the 1960s and saw in it the destruction of life as we know it should rest easy. We now have compliant kids again. Back to the future indeed. The revolution will not only not be televised, it won’t even be imagined. But you can buy the trappings of it at the mall.
Have you seen the t-shirts? “Stop Bitching and Start a Revolution.” Okay, guess what—buying that shirt doesn’t move us along. It only holds us back.