Show Me What You're Made of

This CBBC programme is almost nearing completion of it's second series. I have watched both series with my son, and it opens up all sorts of conversations regarding the global economy and true poverty, helping to provide examples for those lessons that are relevant to him personally.

"Five children travel across the world to live and work alongside the people who make the everyday items they take for granted."

www.bbc.co.uk...

For those without access to i-player, some of the episodes from the last series are available on You tube...





With both series, it is great to watch these kids go from having a sense of spoilt entitlement, to understanding that they have choices that the regular workers in these factories can only dream about it. It draws out of them not only respect for these people, but also a sense of humility and accomplishment.

I realise that this won't interest many people here, but if you have children, it is a wonderful way in which to broach these subjects, and provide a demonstration in point, to how lucky they are, and to counteract the sense of disposable culture that most of our children are bombarded with. Plus I think it is important for children, and adults, to realise that the products that they buy are not created on automated production lines, but by people who depend on that work to survive.

These products are cheap to produce, because the people are paid incredibly low wages with none of the benefits and protections that we receive (and take for granted), the eventual cost to us, is elevated in part through packaging and transportation costs, but primarily, on huge expenditures on advertising and marketing. That is why this work is outsourced to the developing world.

reply to post by KilgoreTrout

Interesting series, but its just as likely that those kids will go home be glad there done and over with all that as the chance that they will take away anything from it. But ya industrialization for many is a dead end to nowersville and they had more time and freedom and were more happier when they were living in villages and towns grinding corn, and making bread and clothes the the old fashion way.

Coincidentally I rarely buy those stuffed toys you see everywhere or any other trinkets, my sister and parents buys those thing for my sis kids every chance they get, and usually they just end up in the garage in a box, or being sent to goodwill, or we usually have to pay to dump it all somewhere which eventually ends up in a landfill somewhere. If anything at least this may get your son or those kids in thinking not to be so wasteful with there consumerism, but then again its kind of hard but not impossible to not be so wasteful. I know were all guilty of a version of that, I know I am, but after all if there wasn't such a big market for cheep throw away goods then half this problem would be solved.

Originally posted by galadofwarthethird
reply to post by KilgoreTrout

 

Interesting series, but its just as likely that those kids will go home be glad there done and over with all that as the chance that they will take away anything from it.

Very, very fair point, and I agree. What the programme does not even try to address is how these children became so self-centred in the first place, and what role their parents, and home life played in that. Someone had to have bought the kids all that crap in the first place after all.

In this second series, one of the kids, Ellie, admits to using manipulation on her parents to get what she wants. She is thirteen, and yet admits to throwing a tantrum if her parents don't give into her demands. Why haven't the parents nipped that kind of behaviour in the bud long ago? I suspect that much of the problem is our culture, and that it also has to do with buying our children's love, when we spend so much time working, absent from their upbringing. We compensate our children with 'things' and blackmail them with pecuniary rewards to get them to behave in the way that we want them to behave, rather than actually doing the hard work of parenting and setting a good example.

Originally posted by galadofwarthethird
But ya industrialization for many is a dead end to nowersville and they had more time and freedom and were more happier when they were living in villages and towns grinding corn, and making bread and clothes the the old fashion way.

Land ownership and the abolition of common land necessitates the transition to employment, because everything becomes commoditised, and has to be bought. And as soon as those people are able to organise themselves in order to demand a living wage, and health and safety regulations, the producer is forced to shut down and find a new work force that can be exploited, leaving those people 'Westernised' and jobless.

Originally posted by galadofwarthethird
Coincidentally I rarely buy those stuffed toys you see everywhere or any other trinkets, my sister and parents buys those thing for my sis kids every chance they get, and usually they just end up in the garage in a box, or being sent to goodwill, or we usually have to pay to dump it all somewhere which eventually ends up in a landfill somewhere. If anything at least this may get your son or those kids in thinking not to be so wasteful with there consumerism, but then again its kind of hard but not impossible to not be so wasteful. I know were all guilty of a version of that, I know I am, but after all if there wasn't such a big market for cheep throw away goods then half this problem would be solved.

The second series deals with much more relevant products, trainers, jeans, cosmetics, canned tunafish etc. Ellie admits to having 20 pairs of shoes in her wardrobe, but also bin bags full of shoes that she no longer wears or has gone off, in the attic. It is not so much what each person has, it is that they think that they 'need' these things, and do not ever comprehend that these possessions originate somewhere, and are made by people who could never afford them themselves. We cry about not having jobs in the west, and that jobs are constantly being outsourced to developing countries, but never question the whys and the wherefores of why that is happening. It never occurs to most people that it is our own demand for more of 'this', or cheaper 'that', that has led to the destruction of our native manufacturing industries. It is always far easier to blame some distant corporate entity, or the exploited labour forces in developing cultures themselves.

Thanks for your reply, and sorry for the rant it inspired

reply to post by KilgoreTrout

Its like critical mass and probably way past time to teach kids and people to do things in other ways, at best one can only educate and bring up there kids to be smart consumers instead of little deviants at the whims of every little thing they get into there heads, which by the way is placed there by others to begin with. I understand people like to have stuff, who doesn't. But when your buying a bunch of things constantly you do not need and probably will never use then you got a problem. Like I said my parents spoil my sisters kids, they literally will buy them anything, my sister was the same till she figured out that she would have to be cleaning up all that junk in a few months when they stop playing with it or using it and it ends up on the floor or in large cardboard boxes. But like you said, it's more the parents fault for not instilling sense in there kids, but when the parents don't have such a sense then what can you expect, if you look at it on a larger scale we are literally breeding and conditioning whole generations of faithful little consumer automatons. There is a point were you got to step back and really ask yourself do I really need this or that thing even if you can afford it, because it's not a matter of can you afford it it's more a matter of should you? Somewhere down the line the things you own eventually end up owning you.

I don't know kind of replaying things from the fight club movie, some philosophy books, random YouTube and net vids, and other places, mostly because about a week ago I lost my phone and even though I rarely even use it, in fact, if not for work related stuff I had that phone like a year and a half and only like actually used it to call people to talk to like 10 times in all that time, and usually I just get texts or send texts as its just faster and easier. But once I lost it I found out how reliant on it I was as were I work the dam schedule changes a lot and you get texts on that so it became sort of second hand to check up on the phone or text somebody else to find out what is up, once I did not have that it was a whole lot of bother just to find out things that took me seconds to find out before. Also I got in a car crash today in fact like a few hours ago it happened. And my jeep is out of commission, in fact I should of known it was coming a dam fortune cookie warned me that I may get into a car crash, well it did not put it in exactly that way but using my brilliant intellect and knowledge of fortune cookies its what I surmised it meant. It is true, not that I hated my jeep or that phone and it was dam useful, in fact necessary were I'm at, which I get and all that. But still that saying is way true, the things you own end up owning you and you do not even realize it, and if you become depended on them its even worse. There has to be a balance somewhere and everybody has to be aware of it and find there own individual balance in this our consumer society.

Originally posted by galadofwarthethird

Great video. I like that, sums things up perfectly.

At the beginning of August a young guy who had arrived in my city after being made homeless, turned up at the church where I work and asked if I could store his stuff for him for a couple of days. His possessions comprised of two half filled bin bags at that point. His intention, he informed me, was to get a place and then he would be back to collect his bags. I pointed him in the direction of the council housing office, the salvation army and the two homeless shelters that we have here to cope with the many people who already live on the streets here. The salvation army found him places in hostels in other cities, he turned them down because they were, in his mind, not nice places to live and by that time, he was making good money begging on the streets that were then filled with tourists, on average, about £50 to £70 a day. He told me that he was going to save for a deposit on a flat. In the space of a week, he bought four pairs of trainers, amongst other things, brought them to the church for me to store for him, until he got the money together for a place of his own. It was clear that he felt better after he had been shopping, it gave him something to do, and he felt as though he had accomplished something when he had a glossy carrier bag filled up to carry around. I told him he needed to get off the streets, that while it seemed friendly then, the tourists would be gone soon, the weather would be getting cold, and the competition for money would lead to hostility between the more hard core homeless. I haven't seen him since September, and I still have his four brand new pairs of trainers, still boxed and in their glossy carrier bags at the church. I don't think he is coming back and I have not been able to ascertain where he went, he simply disappeared, dropped off the face of the Earth.

The funny thing is, he was missing a finger on his right hand, and when I was setting up the crib at the front of the church ready for our carol service, I noticed that at some point since last year the baby Jesus had lost the exact same finger. True story. And it is not told because I think that that young man was Jesus incarnate, just that it brought home to me how powerless I am to create change. That is a hard lesson, when you are surrounded by both need and greed in equal measure, with apathy prevalent at both ends of the scale.



As you say, kind of, the only influence that we really have is over ourselves and our actions.

Again, thanks for the reply and your, as always, unique perspective on things. Appreciated.

reply to post by KilgoreTrout

Interesting, but ya the streets are not the place to be even if the dude sounds like he was making more money then I did by begging, like you said once the mood and atmosphere changes its a different story. You know I think it was last year or maybe some years back were they found a few and by few I mean that I heard of at random stories of homeless people frozen to death on the streets. And right now this whether is not the place to be out in.

As for your buddy or whatever, who knows. Maybe he left town, maybe he will be back, for all you know he could be in Fiji right now on a beach with a sweet little thing next to him light colored blonde about 5,5. I mean who really knows as there so many possibilities, but really only those possibility which one can make up, which by the way usually turn out to be wrong. For all you know the grays kidnapped him or the reptilians got him