We Are Ripping Off Our Children - Ian Purdie

1. The environment.

This planet is a living system. We have been treating it like an inexhaustible free ticket to effortless abundance. We have taken and taken until there is practically nothing left. We are directly responsible for the second greatest extinction of species in geologically recorded history. Only the extinction of the dinosaurs compares with what has been going on for the last 100 years. We have turned 65% of the world’s forests into tooth picks and pencils. Toothpicks and pencils don’t absorb CO2. 90% of the large fish species are gone, the coral reefs are disappearing and we are fishing our way down the food chain while pumping unprecedented amounts of our shit into the sea and air. The Earth our mother is screaming at us that she can take and give no more.

When we chop down a tree the only expenses we acknowledge are the fuel in the chainsaw, the hourly rate for the men and bulldozers on the job and whatever it cost’s us to lug it to a saw mill, chop it up and ship it to some consumer. The Earth’s investment in growing it is not only completely ignored, consideration is ridiculed as irrelevant tree hugger bullshit.

We have reached ‘peak oil’. The Earth takes millennia to produce oil and we are extracting it, burning it and turning into greenhouse gasses as quickly as we can discover new deposits. We are raping the planet! We are turning its goodness into obscene salaries for Ceo’s and sportsmen and women far more quickly than these things can ever be replenished.

We will bequeath to our children global warming. That is resulting in a less stable climate every day we continue to ignore it. We will leave them depleted agricultural systems, polluted land, sea and air and butchered ecosystems.
A privileged few children will receive inheritances of billions of dollars. These will benefit minorities and are the result of the selfishness and insensitivity of a small group of thoughtless, ruthless people that our cultural systems have allowed to accumulate more than can ever be justified by anybody.

And where is this value? Ruthlessly extracted from a compliant planet, will any of it be used to save our children and their children from the inevitable consequences of unbridled greed and selfishness? When our Earth is gasping for relief from the onslaught of ignorant selfish humanity, will those resources be there to save us? Will they be sufficient? The answer is NO! NO they won’t be able to be returned to where they belong. Technology has empowered a few people to steal the resources that would otherwise have been necessary to support future generations of life, not merely human. These resources are squandered daily in the obscene salaries of those who are leading the charge to destroy our children’s future.    

2. Education

Hex. What is a hex? It’s a curse. If you hex somebody you are cursing them with magic. We are cursing our brightest off-spring with debt. Our society is not prepared to invest in the education of its children. We slam our brightest with debt before they are out of the education system. The HECs debt has reached a record 13 billion dollars. It takes the average student 7.1 years to repay the cost of their tertiary education. They are forced to pay interest during that time. We reward our brightest and best with a huge financial rock around there young necks. Before they’ve made dollar one they are beholden to financial institutions and are paying interest.

When Kevin Rudd went to uni, he paid nothing. In those days the obvious value of an educated public wasn’t just appreciated it was fully funded. These days it is neither. Our Govt would rather sell uni places to the rich off-spring of foreigners than provide it for its own children. The clever country? Just another cynical joke. The ignorant, backward stupid country is more accurate.

And this year in Victoria there are 20,000 more students wanting to go to uni than there are places available for them. The figure for NSW and the ACT is 10,000 places short.

3. Politically.

When I was born in 1957 there was such a thing as human rights. We had the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. There was the right of Habeas corpus which said that a citizen could not be locked up for no reason. We had the Geneva convention to protect the rights of combatants in war.

Today we have Guantanamo Bay. This is direct and stark proof that none of these things exist any more. They have been circumvented for political expediency.

In 1957 the family was a legally constructed union that provided security and sanctuary for children. Today we have opted to grant selfish shallow people the right to be sexually permissive. We have elevated the rights of adults to be selfish above the rights of children to have security. We have empowered the foolish and short sighted to pursue fantasies at the expense of the reality of children. We have liberated women at the expense of their femininity, their nurturing motherhood and there right to respect. We have liberated women to put themselves and their perceived personal wellbeing ahead of their families. We have renounced substance in the face of expedience. We have empowered selfishness and elevated it to be the creed of our brave new world.

The results are as obvious as they are horrifying. We have cashed in a large percentage of our children’s future. They will not be able to grow fat on the Earth’s resources as we have. We are handing them a poisoned chalice. The value has been extracted and dissipated in pointless selfishness.

It’s time for the fathers of the world to stand up and say “ENOUGH!” As fathers our primary duty is to protect our children so that they can lead happy productive lives. This goal becomes less realistic every day as we continue to ignore the damage we are doing to our planet, our political and legal systems. As we continue to put our prosperity and ambitions ahead of theirs.

4. Food

Last week I read extracts from an article in the Daily TELEGRAPH BY Clare Masters entitled “Working mums - fat kids, Children’s diets pay the price for parent’s jobs”. But its worse than that. In this country we’ve allowed multinational corporations to prey upon our children thru insidious advertising practises designed to hook them up to substandard nutritional habits for the benefit of nameless stockholders. McDonalds, Pizza Hut, KFC and a host of other international predators invest millions in researching how to get children to pester their parents into cheap, easy fast food diets. Diets that consist of 100% chemical flavours so that children’s young tastebuds are hoodwinked into preferring false flavours to the real thing. Anyone who has read ‘Fast Food Nation’ is aware that the flavour in a MacDonald’s strawberry milkshake consists of a list a page and a half long, of chemicals. The rest of the ‘food’ is so processed that the flavour has to be inserted just before serving otherwise it would taste like what it really is and nobody would ever consider putting it in their mouth. The main ingredients are sugar and trans fats that are now known to cause lots of health problems from cancer to diabetes. When asked about all this one of the executives at McD’s was quoted as saying “You don’t have to eat it”.

But that’s not all. In order to grow more food more cheaply we resort to a vast array of chemical sprays and fertilisers that are finding there way into every organism on the planet. DDT can be found in the tissue of every living creature as can a host of alphabetical nasties like PCB’s heavy metals, and mercury. None of these things are good for our children.

Your friendly scientists are busy inventing roughly 4000 new chemicals every day. These are tested by those same scientists to ensure that there will be only minor consequences for which they can be held liable. However we know from the behaviour of the tobacco and asbestos industries, to name just two of the most obvious examples, that these people will lie and fake results to boost bottom lines and share prices at the expense of the health of their customers.
Now we have genetically modified or GM foods as well as cloned meat products that have recently been cleared by the US food and drug administration. Why, when we live in a world that produces more than enough food, do we allow these people to tamper with our food supply. They don’t do it to make things better for consumers. They do it to make bigger profits.

We’ve got people like Monsanto producing seeds that only produce one generation of plant so that farmers have to buy from them every year. They are attempting to create a monopoly so that our children will not be able to find seeds and plant them. Everything will have to be bought from Monsanto.

I personally believe the old maxim ‘if it aint broke don’t fix it’ especially when it comes to our food.

Nobody knows for certain what GM food will do to the next generations of our children. Anybody who claims that they do is a liar.

Do we want liars controlling our children’s food supply?

I Don’t!

5. Emotionally.

At one point you loved each other and created a child or children. Even though your paths have changed, you once possessed the love necessary to bring a young child into this world and that love still exists in that child. You may have separated from your partner but the children still deserve every ounce of your love. No matter how hard it is for you and your ex to relate to each other, the children that you both created deserve that effort from you both.
Sadly, many separated couples these days choose to use their children as bargaining chips or as weapons to damage each other emotionally. The impact of this upon children is incalculable. It really screws them up.
The adversarial court system automatically favours the mother above the father and merely facilitates this emotional abuse of children. Lawyers actually encourage it.

The only way to avoid this disgusting injustice is to reach an agreement well away from courtrooms and lawyers. You must under every circumstance put your children’s needs above your bitterness and hatred. They need your love, whether you are their mother or their father. They need you both in there lives cherishing them as the precious miracles that every child is. You must rise above your pain! You must protect your children from it at any cost. You chose to bring them into the world, not vice versa. It is your primary responsibility to make sure that there is a safe loving place for them.

We are failing to do this.

Ian Purdie