But what I am always aware of are the on-board announcements about safety, facilities and, my particular favourite, “…don’t allow children to wander around unattended or unsupervised for the comfort of the other passengers”. What this unremarkable instruction asks for is an amount of care for fellow travellers. Don’t let your kids run riot and, perhaps more importantly, understand what it means to share space with other people.
So far so good (which is a good expression when you cover so many miles on a boat each year) but this assumes that the announcement is heard by a generation of parents who actually care about the content. This morning, for example, a young couple who apparently over the Christmas holidays lost the power of speech, sat at a table, constantly scouring their mobiles for messages that didn’t exist at 7.30am, allowing their young 3 year-old son (actually, this is an assumption, given that he was screaming at a pitch only dogs could hear) to run-riot, unattended, unsupervised and, from their perspective, uninterested! Both exchanged glances at each other, which I assume meant “it’s your turn”, and, when the Dad finally stood up because the child had fallen over in the restaurant, spilling all the Tomato ketchup over his clean, and apparently very expensive Sweat shirt, the Mother (who was probably no more than 25) sat in her place, weighed down as if she were the only woman who had ever had such a strong-willed child to bring up! Self-absorption on a grand-scale, probably only fully comprehended by the ‘mobile phone, look-at-me generation’.
This, frankly, minor episode came the morning after what, I believe, was the most irresponsible BBC News broadcast I have ever heard. And, although the link here is tenuous, I believe the two subjects are conjoined. Having listened to an editorial list that included murder, floods, worldwide food and fuel prices at epic levels, and a whole host of soon to befall us biblical tragedies, I ended up asking myself the question “What happened to the Media’s responsibility for striking a balance between good and bad news?” What’s wrong with, just occasionally, showing the upside of some of these stories – the young Australian mother who asserted that ‘there’s nothing I can do about the weather, the water will be gone soon and we can rebuild again!” Or the fact that high fuel prices might actually make us a little more circumspect about our gas guzzling lives and adjust our approach for the better. Or the fact that, it’s an extraordinary series of global events conspiring to push food prices higher, but things will stabilise and isn’t it a positive thing that the developing nations are now getting their fair share of global resources.
See, there’s the link! Self-absorption. Plain and simple. We have such a strangely powerful Island-nation perspective that we need help seeing beyond self-preservation and our media have a responsibility NOT to cultivate a country crammed with the self-interested. But my fear is that it might be too late. The first part of my story is no longer anecdotal. It’s become epidemic. Mobile phones, digital cameras, social networks all make the mundane assume massive significance, whilst the only way that conventional media can get our attention is to scare us into submission. Balance and responsibility have left then building!
Now, as the Grumpy Old Man said, “shut that child up!”
Posted by Simon Dover
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