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	a quiet place by peggy o'mara

Disturbing The Peace
Issue 106

In a democratic society, our liberties are continually mediated by the liberties of others. Our ordinances reflect acknowledgment of this greater good, the common good. In an increasing number of states, for example, public lighting that reflects toward the ground--down-lighting--is regulated so that the darkness of the night sky is protected. Human retinas, it turns out, regulate our sleep patterns by the rhythmic changes of light and dark. Communities also have noise ordinances. Most of us would not hesitate to call the police if our neighbor's loud party went too late. Additionally, we expect others to have certain boundaries, to speak to us from a certain distance and to have a certain demeanor. If a stranger solicited us who was too friendly or too overbearing, we would be offended. We might not feel safe. In certain circumstances, we might even consider the stranger's actions criminal.

How is the behavior of this stranger any different or any less offensive than the behavior of businesses that increasingly invade our public space with their solicitations?

It is one thing when these commercial solicitations invade the public space common to adults. We supposedly can discriminate and filter out unwanted messages. When children are continually exposed to these ubiquitous commercial messages, however, it is another thing altogether. Children do not have the discrimination of adults, nor should they. In fact, it is the very openness and receptivity of children that makes commercialism in public places and advertising to children so insidious. It is exploitative to take advantage of their innocence.

In recent times, democratic societies have protected this innocence. Childhood has been seen as a special time when children are under the protection of all. Most would agree that children should not be exposed to adult experiences such as violence, profanity, or sexual explicitness. I would argue that profanity includes the adult emotions of cynicism, hopelessness, and despair and that children should also be protected from these.

Increasingly, instead of protecting children from adult emotions, we use them to seduce our young people. Instead of collectively viewing childhood as a time to be protected, the business community increasingly uses it to develop brand identification. Budding citizens are reduced to "little consumers" hurried through childhood so that they can get to the real thing. Childhood is the real thing.

Childhood is the time of the dream--the time when children are supposed to be in their own worlds, the worlds of their imaginations. Children need a great deal of unstructured, self-directed time to just be. It is their rich experience of imaginative play during childhood that lays the foundation for later abstract and creative thinking. Because children's creative minds are so active during these early years, they will incorporate into their play the images that surround them. Normally these are the images of home, family, and nature. When these images are supplanted with commercial ones from the imaginations of others, play becomes imitative rather than creative, and later capacities may be compromised.

I worry about this compromising, about subtle influences on my children that I can't always control. I worry that the commercial imagery in society competes with the influences of home and family for my children's affection. A child is by nature highly receptive to the environment. When that environment treats children as objects, they may learn to treat themselves and others as objects, too. By allowing commercial messages to dominate our social landscape, we are collectively telling children something very different from what we tell them as parents. As parents, we tell our children that we value them for who they are. As a society, we tell children that we value them for what they have. Whose voice do our children listen to?

The fact that commercial interests compete with me for my children's attention disturbs my peace of mind. Doesn't the domination of commercialism in public spaces qualify as disturbing the peace? I think it does. It certainly interferes with my own pursuit of happiness. If an individual were dominating public space for his or her own gain, the community would set limits. We would question the individual's right to communicate his or her message in this way. We would weigh the liberties of the individual giving the message with the liberties of those getting the message.

Currently in society, we have little such dialogue because we do not acknowledge the impact of commercialism and we fear that setting limits on business is inherently undemocratic. We do not weigh the appropriateness of a commercial message against the age of its audience. Nor do we hold the activities of businesses accountable to society and to the common good as we do individuals. We should. And we should do this not because we are anti-commerce or anti-business. On the contrary. A healthy society that values the common good will produce and consume more efficiently, and therefore more successfully, than a society based on selfishness and greed. Business has always been expected to abide by certain standards of public service, and, until recently, business was conducted in the business sphere. Now it operates in the public sphere and increasingly at those intersections where childhood meets the public space. We are, for example, one of the only countries that allows advertisements on children's television programming. Four 24-hour-a-day commercial children's networks compete for our children's "buying power."

Children can inadvertently catch sexually explicit television programming, violence, or profanity pretty much any time of day just by changing channels. Just a few decades ago, this type of programming was restricted to later in the evening when children would be less likely to be watching. It wasn't erroneously assumed that it was the job only of parents to protect children from such programming.

Schools do not protect children from television programming and advertising. Schoolchildren all over the United States watch required programming broadcast by Channel One, programming that contains ads. Two Ohio teenagers walked out of their classroom in October to protest the compulsory viewing of Channel One commercial television. They were deemed truant by the principal and sent to the Wood County Juvenile Detention Center for a day. (See Adbusters, March-April 2001, page 18.) The irony is that children are required by law to attend school and then are legally bound to be captive audiences for commercialism.

One can always argue that parents can just turn off the TV or send their child to a private school. While the first is probably a good idea, the second is elitist in nature because it is an option available only to some members of society and it undermines the integrity of public schools. In a democratic society, the solution of a conflict does not rest with abandoning the situation. The civil liberties of my child in a school that accepts advertising have been violated. My rights as an owner of the public airways have been violated. These rights should be mediated with the rights of the television broadcasters and the school administrators. This is the way of the common good. Common good should be the basis of democratic legislation and civic action.

Just as democracy has become equated not with the common good, but with economic growth, so has freedom become equated with license. Questioning another's freedom is considered un-American. Questioning the excesses of commercialism is considered anti-business. We seldom take the opportunity to debate as a democratic society such a healthy clash of boundaries, but rather rush to support the dominant side under the assumption that dominance suggests superiority. By avoiding the messiness of debate that a real democracy requires, we have given license to the excesses we now bemoan. License is being able to do what you want no matter what. Freedom is being able to do what you want as long as you do not violate the freedom of others.

One of my freedoms is the pursuit of happiness. In my pursuit, I have found that I am happier when I maintain a positive mental environment. If messages in my environment are hateful, negative, and violent, this is more difficult. Sensory stimuli can agitate my negative emotions. For example, when I see a violent movie, I may appreciate its artistic value, but for days I am left with the residue of the violent words and images. When I hear songs that have hateful lyrics, I can't get the rhymes out of my mind.

I don't want to expose myself or my children to this type of psychic pollution. As an adult, I have the maturity to fairly well navigate the challenging messages that come my way, and I have some control over my exposure. Children do not. In addition, many of these negative messages speak to us unexpectedly, in public environments where we aren't prepared to see them.

We have to insist that our society protect vulnerable members, especially children. We must regain a concept of the common good, of healthy boundaries in public space. In keeping with this, we have a right to expect businesses, which hold a charter with the public, to have codes of ethics that address the impact of their business practices on society, on families, and on children.

Do we as the public have some say in the use of our public space? What do we want our social landscape to look like? Do we want advertising targeted to children? Do we want television in schools? Do we want television to dominate public places like airports and restaurants? Where are billboards and signage appropriate? Look around your own social landscape and see how much space is commercial-free.

Not only do we have to be careful as parents about the commercialism in public places, we also must not be naïve about the commercialism that lurks in unexpected places. We don't tend to think of health care as a business, but it is. Even if we have insurance, we still pay for health care, and in some states our healthcare expenditures are taxed. Healthcare providers receive incentives from pharmaceutical companies for the use of their products. Commercialism has found its way even into health care.

This wasn't always the case. Medicines were not always advertised directly to the public. It wasn't until the early 1980s, for example, that formula advertisements appeared in popular magazines. Up until then, formula had been advertised only to doctors in medical journals. In the 1990s, prescription drugs began to be advertised to the public. Drugs for HIV, for example, are advertised in Sunday newspaper supplements. Now, it is common for a patient to request a drug by name from his or her doctor. Rather than being based on evidence and research, pharmaceutical promotion has become a business in which the drug companies create a need by direct and indirect advertising to citizens.

In addition to using direct consumer advertising for prescription drugs, pharmaceutical companies can position their ads on television shows whose content supports their product, and companies even sometimes shape the content of an episode. Vaccine manufacturers, for example, have advertised on shows that depict death from childhood disease. Formula companies advertise on shows about breastfed babies who die from dehydration. The line blurs between entertainment and advertising even in the healthcare arena. This blurred line has been investigated by The Center for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting whose paper Fear & Favor 2000: How Power Shapes the News is available on their website, www.fair.org/ff2000.html. Two citizen organizations are working to curb the excesses of commercialism in our society. One is the Motherhood Project, a new group that has issued to the media a mother's statement on children and commercialism and will report to parents on the ethics of businesses who market to children. Another is Commercial Alert, a two-and-a-half year old organization that hopes to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere and to prevent it from degrading the higher values of home, family, and society. (See www.commercialalert.org.) These organizations give us hope as parents that something is being done about over-commercialism and advertising to children and that parents and family are recognized as the greatest influences in the lives of children. What children learn primarily in childhood is to model the behavior of adults. And as adults, we can create a better society in our own homes. We can continue raising our children as subjects, not as objects. We can encourage children to know their own worth and not to judge themselves or others superficially. In any society at any time, what we model for our children in our day to day lives means the most. Improving our own mental environment and modeling wholesome, authentic values in our own lives will ultimately have more influence on our children than the negative influences of any society. Changing the culture of materialism will take time, and it begins by changing our own thinking.