Parents: This Is How They Mess with our Minds

Click here to access article by Cynthia Peters from TeleSur.

Cynthia Peters is the editor of The Change Agent. She is a longtime activist and a member of City Life/Vida Urbana, and she serves on the board of a youth justice organization called The City School and the alumni board of Social Thought and Political Economy at UMASS/Amherst.

Peters correctly interprets the usual parental advice that ruling class media impose on parents by examining one piece called "Raising a Moral Child" published in the NY Times as an illustration. Ruling class media always place the burden of child raising on the shoulders of parents or parent (in the case of single parents). This emphasis conveniently ignores the real overwhelming effects of the immoral or amoral influences emanating from all major institutions which, of course, are controlled by our masters.

While you’re parsing out these methods for raising a moral child and self-consciously scanning the horizon for an opportunity to role-model being nice, you will wisely block out all the messages about greed and ownership and one-upmanship that your kid is getting from about a billion other sources.

While we parents do mostly all the dirty, hard work of raising children (changing diapers, tending them when they are sick, clothing them, making all kinds of sacrifices for them), the ruling class institutions to a great extent fill their minds with the importance of shopping, of obeying (their) authorities, serving their country by invading foreign lands and killing people living there, etc.

After all, our culture is saturated with messages that acquisition is a moral imperative, that the way to be good is to have lots of stuff, and that the way to be the best is to have more stuff than anyone else. Greed is considered an inherent good; it is the motor that drives our entire economy, and so endless resources are spent justifying it, propping it up, and making it seem like a worthy quality rather than a depraved one.