The editorial (“Keeping Our Eye on the Ball that Matters,” May 16) is very timely. But perhaps it should have read, “Keep Your Eye on the Kids.” Like the old saying “Robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is” equates with “Advertisers advertise where the money is: our kids.”
Times are a-changin’. At my youth-challenged age, I remember the ‘30s radio programs with Orphan Annie advertising Ovaltine; later, The Lone Ranger and Captain Midnight extolling products for kids, to buy three whatever and send in the coupons for a decoder badge, etc.
Kids have it too easy these days: Parents, who are more affluent, can buy the $300 video games they want, without much pleading. I will concede, a few [kids] may work for what they want in various ways, baby-/house-sitting, lawn mowing or chores at home, plus an allowance.
Not so much for those parents not so affluent: Kids may have more time to be out on the streets or engage in activities not under control of the parents, [which] can lead to trouble.
Whether parents are moneyed or not, it behooves the parents to apply good parenting skills in the long term to help kids stay on the straight and narrow to be good citizens.
Leonard (Lenny) Larson North Beacon Hill
Your exemplary May 16, 2012, editorial denouncement of corporate media’s lying pursuit of the lucrative kids’ consumer money ought to be printed by every newspaper in the nation. But it won’t. And even if it [were], it would be too late.
The parents you seek to alert to protect their young are already media zombies themselves. The whole, gullible population’s already enslaved by the free market.
Just one local media fraud example is talk radio: never-ending, hysterical, phony hype — to sell whatever.
What hope is there for a population [that] tolerates the sales of its political leaderships via billions of dollars paid to corporate marketers?
As you note, the Nazi/[Soviet] commie brainwashers were primitives by comparison. Hitler was a Piker; we’ve got the commercialization of childhood for life.
Gordon Anderson Pritchard Beach