Miserable teenagers

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A survey by the Children’s Society in the UK has found that Britain has the least happy teenagers in Europe. The charity’s chief executive, Mark Russell, believes he knows the reason. It’s down to “the increase in child poverty”, he says.

There are two big problems with this explanation. The first is that “there hasn’t been a rise in child poverty in the UK”. The second is that our children are actually far better off than many others in Europe. Take Spanish youngsters: 82% reported themselves happy in this survey (compared with a mere 64% of their UK peers). Yet a Eurostat study by the European Commission shows they’re of equal risk of poverty or social exclusion as British children. Their peers in Greece, Italy and Romania are at considerably more risk, yet they rank among Europe’s most cheerful teenagers.

In fact, the correlation appears to be the opposite of the one Russell identified. It’s not a lack of money; if anything, it’s the “appurtenances of affluence” – feelings of entitlement, social media-fuelled dissatisfaction and envy – that are making our children dissatisfied, envious and miserable.
(Rod Liddle, The Sunday Times and The Week, 5 September 2020).

My comment: In the “good ‘ole days” we had no Facebook (which doesn’t mean there was no bullying, one-up-manship, or showing off). But, rose-tinted spectacles firmly on my nose, I recall a teenage-ship full of reading, music, school uniforms, the importance of sport, and talk (only) about girls; and that’s about it. Probably just as well!

An explanation for the huge divide in American society

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The following is a slightly edited version of a review by Tom Krattenmaker of a book by Kurt Anderson: “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History”: (Random House, 2020). I quote:

“The paradigm shift of the 1980s really was equivalent in scale and scope to those of the 1960s and the 1930s. Key intellectual foundations of ourlegal system were changed. Our long-standing consensus about acceptable and unacceptable conduct by big business was changed. Ideas about selfishness and fairness were changed. The financial industry simultaneously became reckless and more powerful than ever. The liberal establishment began habitually apologizing for and distancing itself from much of what had defined liberal progress. What made America great for centuries, a taste and knack for the culturally new, started to atrophy in the 1980s.

This conservative momentum – the Reagan revolution – kept charging ahead through the 90s and onwards. Eye-glazing changes in business and financial regulations gave oligarchs their victory and their spoils, while leaving the vast majority of Americans in a state of ever-increasing economic insecurity, stranded on the wrong side of a canyon of income inequality not seen since the Gilded Age.

The villainous masterminds of the story – people like the Koch’s, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors, and Robert Bork, and think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, hid their plan to make a tiny number of people super- rich and replace FDR’s New Deal, projecting a veneer of philosophical and ethical worthiness that persuaded the media and the public that it would be best for everyone if business was less restrained.

This was achieved firstly by manipulating the boring rules and regulations that protect the public from predatory capitalism. Secondly, ramping up the pre-existing spirit of extreme individualism and self expression that took off in the 1960s. The message was: “O.K, hippies and liberals, you win. From now on, it’s maximum freedom and individualism for all. You have your sexual and artistic self- expression by all means. You do your thing and we’ll do ours” (that is, make pots of money). Thirdly, conservative interests played on the public longing for the “good old days”, manufacturing nostalgia for a public ready for calm after the tumultuous 1960s.

The book brings us up to date with the virus that has tested us and found us wanting. On top of the unaddressed climate crisis and the extreme form of short- term, profit- obsessed capitalism that serves only the plutocrats, it is clear that the current paradigm is played out. Incoherent support of Trump is a cry of anger and frustration, a cri de coeur from a huge section of the population who feel the promise of America has evaded them. They blame Washington while in fact it is the “conservative” plutocrats and money men who have skewed life to their own selfish benefit and then blamed Democrats and the Washington civil service.

My comment: We have to restore the sharing of economic power and wealth we once had (I think!). Enough is enough.

Evangelicals in the US

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Prior to the election in swing states where lots of evangelicals vote, $140,000 worth of billboards contrasted biblical quotes with those of President Donald Trump. One had an image of Jesus on the left with the phrase, “Turn the other cheek,” while on the right was a photo of Trump saying, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” The signs were up in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and more.

With exit polls trickling in that suggest Trump’s support among white evangelicals slipped around 5 percentage points nationwide to 76 percent, and more in a few battleground states, the coordinated effort among this group that makes up roughly one-fifth of the electorate might have ensured victory for Joe Biden.

The billboards—part of a campaign dubbed, “His Words Matter”— were courtesy of Vote Common Good, which spent $2.5 million to defeat Trump, and teamed with other organizations such as Faith 2020, Catholics for Biden, and The New Moral Majority. They went on a bus tour, stopping in 41 states for rallies that drew as many as 250 evangelicals each, and always made the local news on TV and in newspapers; they mailed postcards to Republican voters in Michigan urging them to vote against Trump; and they cut commercials with evangelicals pledging to do just that.

In Wisconsin,Trump is poised to lose by less than 1 percent of the votes, as is the case in Georgia and Pennsylvania, while the difference in Michigan is about 2 percent. In Kent County, Michigan, considered an evangelical stronghold, Biden earned 50,000 more votes than did Hillary Clinton four years earlier, ensuring it flipped from Republican in 2016 to Democrat in 2020. (Newsweek 11/13/20).

My comment: A British evangelical told me a while ago ago that she thought American evangelicals were not true evangelicals – real evangelicals are Christian and behave as true Christians behave: With loving kindness and tolerance, to start with.