The Oil Drum

72 comments on Peak Oil and the Environment Part 3 - Day 1

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john milton on May 9, 2006 - 7:45am

When I was a kid (I'm 44 now) there were 300 bicycles locked up at the school I went to for K...Grade 6 on a nice day (the student population is 600 students) I went by there the other day and counted 6 bikes, 2 of which were adult sized, thus teachers or staff.

Why? Because of the new perception that we live in a world of sex offenders and serial killers, parents now drive their children to school

Check out the new releases section at your video store. A significant percentage of Hollywoods income is produced by stoking fears about "demons" of various sorts lurking around the edges of our culture.

The movie they would make about this idea would no doubt be called "Carpool". The plot line such as it is would involve a quite, unassuming guy living in a neighbourhood "just like yours" who passes himself off as a telephone installer, or computer programmer, or something, but who has hot wired the fingerprint scanner in his car to send false data and spends the day crusing the expressways of L.A. picking up single women, who wind up in mason jars under the floor of his basement crawl space.

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BrianT on May 9, 2006 - 7:59am

Good post. What used to be luxuries of the rich (getting driven to school) have now become necessities in the consumption-driven economy. Drive the kids to school then enroll them in an expensive weight-watchers program.The society has bought into the idea that the worth of something is measured by its expense.

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jim burke on May 9, 2006 - 12:51pm

YOu are exactly right. In my small town, the kids used to bike or walk around in their spare time, and go for hikes in the mountains or desert.

As near as I can tell, those are lost arts. I never see kids bicycle or hike, and rarely walk. In fact, I rarely see them at all, except for hitching to grassy park downtown to hang out. I guess they spend their time in the net (much as I do, which is why I'm writing this; but I still hike and occasionally bike...)

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john milton on May 9, 2006 - 2:29pm

Most urban North American children in this day and age who's parents would allow them to "go for a hike in the woods" would percive it as a pointless activity. Things "worth doing" are, by and large, activities that have been packaged and marketed to them as being "worth while" by television advertising / pop culture, and a walk in the woods has no "cool".

Hanging out with their peer group is sort of an exception to this, because even though it lacks a direct purchase component children do have a hard wired developmental need for group acceptance and validation by peers, but you'll notice that importance is placed on donning the outward markers of "coolness" prior to them leaving for the mall/park/wherever What these are will vary depending on current and local fashion and the tribe or clique with which they identify as members i.e. "branded" clothing, hair, makeup, i-pod, goth garb, etc.

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john milton on May 9, 2006 - 2:44pm

I sould add that many of the things that "the walk in the woods" now has to compete against are very powerful, and in some cases addictive.

Examples:

Television viewing: This is how most children aquire their culture (mostly from the commercials, but somewhat from the actual program content), as do their parents. Children have a powerful need for cultural knowledge, also, if you watch someone watching T.V., without watching it yourself they are clearly drugged, or at least "held in thrall" which I count as the same thing

Video games: Addictive, but not in the way t.v. broadcast programming is. Broadcast programming is a clearly a depressant, video games are a stimulant with the drug being adrenallin and the brains other fight / flight hormones

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tochigi on May 10, 2006 - 12:08pm

Hi JM,

A shockingly good couple of posts IMHO.
you are right about the tv brainwashing. it applies to radio too.
i know because I've seen it.
we don't have a tv so when our 8-yr-old watches it for a while at someone's house, the impact is amazing. and after he listen's to commercial radio in my wife's car for a few hours he parrots the ads for days.

and your comment about being held in thrall is dead right too.
when our son was about 14 months old, we went to an acquaintance's place who had a daughter 4 months younger. when the twice-daily public tv program for mothers and under-2s came on, this lively little girl just sat there motionless with her eyes fixed on the screen for the whole 10 mins. she was in a trance. and then it ended and she became human again.

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