How do our kids get so caught up in consumerism?
by Brian Swimme, Ph. D.M In the Merck Family Fund’s Yearning for Balance national survey, 86 percent of people agreed or strongly agreed that "today’s youth are too focused on buying and consuming things." This is a touchstone issue for children and the future. The following book excerpt deals with how children today discover what it means to be human. How are we initiated into the universe? To answer we need to reflect on what our children experience over and over again, at night, in a setting similar to those children in the past who gathered in the caves and listened to the chant of the elders. If we think in terms of pure quantities of time the answer is immediate: the cave has been replaced with the television room and the chant with the advertisement. One could say that the chant has been replaced with the television show, but at the core of each show, driving the action, and determining whether or not the show will survive the season, is the advertisement. ...