DUCKPOND

One of the long term effects of the Illawarra Ideas Summit is that it gave a sense of other people’s problems – the young, the old, the disabled, the unfortunate and the changing demographic profile of the population. There are, it seems, always exceptional individuals, and while perhaps they should not be taken as the rule, but they show what can be done. Now this bloke does even look like an 80 year old person, let alone act like one. Wendy Urguhart has the BBC video report.

The media, and especially television, carry some responsibility for creating the culture we have by the narratives they construct. And it is from such stories, so it is said that people develop their moralities and views of the world. I suspect, since I do not watch television as a rule, that the positive role models of healthy and actively socially engaged older persons are not portrayed. On reflection, should the thesis regarding television as the principle constructing agent of culture be correct, it is easy to see how the advertisers need for target psychographic markets fits with the social segmentation of the population, so that there is not a whole of population and whole of life approach to health and education.

We were all young once, but it seems very easy to forget the problems the young experience. Self obsession, if not narcissism is very much the package of the a media wrapped, commercial culture. Self harm and suicide, for example, did not feature in the Youth Summit, and probably will not be mentioned in the current meeting, partly by crowding out in a full agenda and partly because the problems experience by an elite will not be those experienced by those caught in the threadmill. I had forgotten, for example, that the university experience, even though the credentials its seems in my case did not amount even to a hill of beans, has pressures of assignments and exams. Those experiences had resided from my mind, although my courses of study might not have been as stringent and demanding as others.

My big idea, in so far as I have any, is to frame a society in which education, vocation and culture are congruent. Now it seems to me the place to begin is culture. And then you have a head-on collision with corporate capitalism – or least as it is now practices, rather what was promised by Adam Smith.

ELSEWHERE:

Deutsche Wella describes the pressures experienced by German students and the inevitable resorts to means to ameliorate them.

I notice that Pope Benedict has been expressing his views at least in regard to the young. The Sydney Morning Herald ran the article by Michael Paulson and Micheal Levenson in The Boston Globe, in which the Pope is quoted as saying:

“The dreams and longings that young people pursue can so easily be shattered or destroyed,” he said. “I am thinking of those affected by drug and substance abuse, homelessness and poverty, racism, violence, and degradation – especially of girls and women.

“While the causes of these problems are complex, all have in common a poisoned attitude of mind which results in people being treated as mere objects. A callousness of heart takes hold which first ignores, then ridicules, the God-given dignity of every human being.”

A non-violent approach would not ignore the perpetrators of violence, but endeavour to understand their behavior. It is challenging to consider that when any person is considered as “other”, that separation is a beginning that often may lead to violence. The causes of the problems may be many, there may be poisoned attitudes, but saying that does not even start to solve the problems. The notion that all people should be accorded respect and dignity is not limited with those with religious, indeed spiritual values.