Children spouting ideology they don’t understand

‘Puke’ seems pretty strong to me. Could you analyse it a bit further?

The message is sound: intolerance and bigotry do contribute to wars and conflicts; children learn intolerance their parents; therefore anything that helps to break the cycle.

Nor is it obvious to me that the children don’t understand it. Maybe the younger ones don’t fully, but what they are saying is pretty basic good sense. It’s no more ‘ideology’ than speaking out against, say, corporal punishment or indoor smoking. I don’t get any sense that brainwashing is occurring – certainly nothing worse than the stuff kids recite at school assemblies every day.

The video is a failure because it’s so belligerent and preachy. Adults don’t like being lectured, especially by young children. And it sets up an atmosphere of inter-generational distrust and hostility that’s at odds with the message it’s trying to convey.

I love the bit about tolerating “orientation.” What is that? Equal acceptance for people who are challenged by compass directions?

I look forward to the sequel where non-compliant Mums and Dads are dobbed in by the kids and hauled away by the Tolerance Compliance Unit while the kids sing, we are the wuuuurrrld, we are the chilllldren…..then they all grow up and go into consumer product marketing.

Perhaps I’ve missed something in the viewing, but just what is ideological about the video? What’s to say that many of those speakers don’t understand the import of what they’re saying?

Apart from being a typical issue from the hypocrisy which is the pax-americana culture, I see nothing wrong with the message. “Be a responsible parent” There’s much more to it than feeding and clothing the little blighters.

Tolerance ain’t acceptance either.
I’ll tolerate stuff , not agree or support it and soemtimes campaign against it.
In this piece of spruiking the kids are a vehicle – so completely opening the author’s to the criticism they are using the unwitting innocents.
Then again what cynical adperson wouldn’t coopt children so as to improve the message’s impact?

Oops stuffed the quotes. [Now fixed – NG] The better to seek positive virtues is me not Walzer.

Definatively pukeworthy, to us Aussies. But in the North American cultural mainstream, that sort of basic face upon children is regarded as what sets them up to be acheivers. We only need to take due not of how Terri Irwin is with Bindi, to realise that the difference is a cultural phenomenon.

That makes it somewhat disturbing to reflect upon what it is that North Americans regard of how pukeworthy our Aussie kids are. Us Aussies seem to have an unfortunate reputation over in America for exposing our children to dangerous and unregulated situations and learning processes. The reputation is so extreme as that many north Americans regard that they can blame every Australian for any risk to their own children from criminal child abuse. The recent episode of South Park in which Mel Gibson was absurdly ridiculed as an S&M addict is a part of the same phenomenon.

Now I have my own rational process of understanding why that reputation exists, but it is a bit heavy duty to be putting into a comment screen. Yet clearly, if it is that the reputation or the Australian character, is so muddy over there in America, we really ought to want to work to disprove the fallacy. Just checking statistics shows at least where more child abuse is being reported.

Interestingly there are many more reports of child abuse in John Howard’s electorate than in any of the Aboriginal communities he sent the army into.

However as for the general pukeworthy nature of children being taught to say what they can not yet possibly comprehend, if its their culture to learn by saying it before you know it, then their parents are only really doing the right thing by their children.

Mainstream American culture is more soundly accountible through its pride (shame), as an influence that the Native American tradition has manifested there; while Mainstream Australian culture is more soundly accountible through our language usage (aka sloth), which is again from the influence of the indigenous tradition. The Rainbow Serpent is a law talker, and that flavours our whole national integrity. So of course it will be foul to all our minds to perceive a child being allowed to say what she can not yet comprehend. For the American, there is an intensely strong onus upon the child and her family to ensure that she lives up to what she said. Terri Irwin described it very neatly in interveiw with Andrew Denton, that to her, there is nothing at all wrong with Bindi becoming entrapped into a course of life events in which she will be an acheiver of a good outcome for the environment.

But maybe there is some other aspect of our indigenous tradition here in Australia which is further regulating our collective subconscious into a pattern of beliefs, around what we will let or not let any child’s face be portrayed. Our Australian children have yet the face of a child; and of a child whom has not been assaulted with an adult’s perspective.