KIDS' TOYS - THE TWISTED TRUTH
They advertise toys to children. During kids' programmes, between the cartoons, on morning television. Even though children can't afford toys. If you think about it, it's shocking. These adverts are not aimed at parents, saying "You're child will like this!" but at the kids, who have all the resistance to the tactics of marketing as a lobotomy patient who's spent the last three years in a coma while undergoing sensory deprivation suspended in a flotation tank. Or me. In truly civilised countries like Sweden that just isn't allowed.
As you may read elsewhere in this paper, Margaret Cox* has come out against the practice. This is somewhat to the annoyance of the Labour party as that was their policy last election, but one hopes there is a consensus arising on the issue. Pushing toys on kids, can that possibly be right? Of course, as politicians up for election they will portray this as some subtle form of child abuse. In fact it's nothing of the kind. What it is is flagrant abuse of parents, a social group who really aren't getting the sympathy they deserve. The toy industry is applying pressure to them through the candied-out eyes of their children. Any way you look at it it's cruel.
Parents are partly to blame themselves of course, because they don't merely want their child to be happy, they want them to be the happiest. That's how deep competitiveness goes in our society. How can they resist buying the widely advertised object of desire, when they know - this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - that the child in the playground with the coolest toys will be the most popular? Competition for status starts just as soon as children start playing together, and you want to help them compete by buying them the status symbol, the logo, the brand. They probably know one label from another in kindergarten now, and it goes on through school right up to... Well, right up to when the kids are old enough to have to buy their own stuff. (Which is when it becomes cool to wear second hand, all of a sudden.) And there really is nothing you can do about this. Bring down the capitalist system? Competitiveness for status really is innate to all animals; capitalism just exploits that fact to the hilt. And then gives the hilt a good twist.
People have tried to resist though. I'll tell you the very strange story of one attempt...
The game 'Monopoly' was originally invented as socialist propaganda. Yeah. Irony rarely gets more steely than that. It was devised by well-meaning parents who wanted to show children an example. Think about it: in the game of Monopoly the players slowly go broke until there's only one left. It represents how in a totally free market it's inevitable that all the money is eventually going to accrue to one person. This was meant to be a lesson in life. Did they not realise that all the kids playing would desperately want to be that one person? The fall of communism seems to have been foreshadowed here.
Though perhaps they were more clever than that. If you think about it, it wasn't actually much fun to win at Monopoly. In most board games everybody is in right up to the end. In Monopoly your playmates are forced out of the game one by one, and so they go off and play something else together. The winner of Monopoly ends up with all the worthless paper, and no friends. That is subtle.
They missed a couple of points though. One is that in real life, the paper is far from worthless. You can use it to buy things, such as new friends. Another is that it's only the winner of the game - the best player - who realises its ultimate futility and learns the lesson. Unless they actually wanted socialists to be a small minority of clever people with no friends, they couldn't really have got it more wrong.
And they weren't to know that one day capitalism would end up being the only game in town.
In the end people just want status, and will compete even if the game is ultimately futile. Can you protect your kids from this? No. It's reality, and ultimately they will have to deal with it themselves. But by banning advertising to your children you may at least be able to protect yourself a little. Go on, you deserve the break.
*Galway politician belonging to the conservative and populist Fianna Fáil party