are environmentalists scaring your kids???

[wakeupamerica]

Are environmentalists scaring your kids?Marcia Segelstein - Guest Columnist - 6/30/2009 7:35:00 AM


http://action.afa.net/Detail.aspx?id=2147485790

Reluctant Rebel logoThere's a video currently making the rounds among schools (and on the Internet) which purports to explain to children how America's consumption of "stuff" is destroying the planet. Specially made to appeal to kids, with child-like animation, enough adults have bought into the message that it's being shown in classrooms across the country.

Annie Leonard created "The Story of Stuff," and narrates the 20-minute video.

In that short period of time, she manages to "teach" children quite a bit. I'll try to sum up a few of the highlights.



First, the civics lesson -- a la Leonard. It's the government's job to watch out for us and take care of us. But the government has become more interested in taking care of big, bad corporations. The government is naughty for not doing enough for us. And big business is just plain evil.

Now the story of how stuff is made. We start with extraction which, according to Leonard, "is a fancy word for natural resource exploitation which is fancy word for trashing the planet." Trees get chopped down, mountaintops are blown off so we can get metals out, and "we use up all the water and we wipe out the animals." Hmmm. I guess I missed the news that we'd used up all the water and wiped out the animal population. But just in case any school children in the audience were having the same thoughts, Leonard assures them that despite the fact that it's hard to hear, "it's the truth."

watch commentary icon smallNext we move on to the lesson in anti-Americanism. We, apparently, use up more than our share of natural resources. "My country's response to this limitation [of natural resources] is simply to go take somebody else's," says Leonard. "This is the Third World." Evidently American are just plain selfish. And cruel to poor countries, too.

Back to stuff-making and production. What exactly is production? It's when we use energy "to mix toxic chemicals in with the natural resources to make toxic-contaminated products." I always wondered what factories were for.

Continuing along the line, so to speak, we come to distribution. How does all this toxic stuff get into our greedy hands and oversized houses? Thanks to stores that keep prices low for consumers by not paying the store workers very much and skimping on health insurance for them. I guess it just can't be said enough: businesses are bad.

She manages a few other jabs worth noting. On the topic of how awful it is to be a consumer, she makes fun of President Bush for encouraging people to shop after the attacks of 9/11. (He actually urged people generally to continue with their lives as normally as possible.) Perhaps she would have preferred an economic collapse. (Come to think of it, she probably would have.) She tells us that when choosing a picture to represent government, her friends told her she should use a tank. "After all, more than 50 percent of our federal tax money is now going to our military." (By the way, based on Congressional Budget Office numbers, that "fact" is wrong. It's more like 20 percent.)

According to The Heritage Foundation, this little propaganda film isn't only being shown in American classrooms. According to a posting there, "This film has been heavily promoted, translate, and distributed in foreign countries." More self-loathing exported overseas. According to Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, "This is community college Marxism in a pony tail."

The New York Times reports that the video is proving effective. Parents of one nine-year-old boy told the Times that their son worried whether buying a set of Legos would be bad for the planet after watching the video.

There actually are important lessons to be taught about consumerism. But, in my opinion, they're more about the fact that money can't buy happiness, and that over-consumption is likely a sign of a sick soul, not a risk factor for killing the planet. If you want to teach your children a good lesson about the down side of over-consuming, I recommend the VeggieTales video Madame Blueberry. No amount of stuff purchased at the Stuff Mart manages to bring the title character true happiness.

It will probably come as no surprise that Annie Leonard is a former Greenpeace worker. She's certainly entitled to her opinion, and to make a video espousing her opinion. But for schools to show this one-sided, environmentally-radical, anti-capitalist, anti-American video to children is unconscionable.

The New York Times also reports that "hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web. It has also won support from independent groups that advise teachers on curriculum choices. Facing the Future, a curriculum developer for schools in all 50 states, is drafting lesson plans based on the video."

So watch out. If your school hasn't already shown the video to your children, they may be planning to in the near future. Plans for a companion book and DVD are in the works.

And if you think you can't make a difference, consider the father in Missoula, Montana, who single-handedly convinced the school district there to ban "The Story of Stuff" based on the argument that it violated standards on bias. Liberals don't have a monopoly on activism.