Kids as Market Fodder
Your article "Pitching to the Cradle" [March 26, 2009] does an effective job of explaining the process and some of the negative implications of marketing to kids. Should we be surprised, though, that the marketing industry is contemptuous of kids? Americans themselves do not hold the values they say they want to teach their children. We love to consume and have long been in an unhealthy partnership with marketers.
While intelligent people tell us our consumption is destroying the air, water, land, the future of the planet and all its inhabitants, we watch television, dine out, drive around and buy, buy, buy. Cosmetics, ChemLawn, electric nose hair trimmers, all manner of useless plastic crap: we don't care as long as it's cheap, or expensive, or just makes us look cool. But ongoing economic growth is, if one believes mainstream news, the solution to all cultural ills. Economic growth is possible only through increased consumption per consumer and/or an increase in the overall number of consumers.
The growth machine demands parenthood because it creates loads of new consumption. The government has even made advertising costs to business tax-deductible. No stone will remain unturned in the quest for revenues and parents are willing participants in the exploitation for profit of their children. The children are simply grease for the machinery of growth and they keep coming, 4.3 million more in the U.S. in 2007. Would-be parents should consider a couple of questions before they decide whether to add another human life to the mix. Who are the beneficiaries of an increasing human population? And who bears the costs?
Gene Green
via email
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Northampton: Good Planning
This may not have been author Mike Kirby's intention, but his article on the proposed North Street development ["Bogged Down," March 19, 2009] convinced me that Northampton's current political leadership is doing the right thing. It seems to me there is a larger, principled vision at work here behind the mayor's and the city planner's actions: concentrate multi-family residential units and new development close to downtown while preserving and expanding woodlands and wetlands at the city's rural fringes. This is a blueprint for a sustainable community if followed through on, and it's obviously a vision that requires political will. This vision will enhance Northampton as a model small city with a vibrant urban core in a beautiful rural setting—much better than economic stagnation on one hand or "McSprawl" on the other. If the mayor and her team are able to work in cooperation with an apparently progressive developer to achieve a small but important piece of this vision (over five belabored, contentious years), they should probably be congratulated rather than subjected to insinuations of powermongering and strong-arming.
Harley Erdman
Florence
