Sesame street’s Hungry Puppet – It sucks being poor, but here’s how to cope

Sesame Street recently introduced a new puppet – Lilly, whose family is living on the breadline, like 17 million families in America who face ‘food insecurity’. She was introduced in an hour long special called ‘growing hope against hunger’  in which advice was given about how to cope with poverty.

I know this is suppossed to be raising awareness of a serious issue, but I can’t help but think all this is doing is ‘normalising poverty’ – making people aware that it exists and assisting them with coping strategies – rather than confronting the underlying causes – kind of like the therapeutic turn in wider society – ‘life’s shit but here’s how all you isolated individuals can cope…. BTW tripe tastes great, honest’.

Being based in the UK I didn’t see the show, but I somehow doubt that it featured any consciousness raising of just how many Americans are facing dire poverty – some of whom cannot actually afford to feed themselves even thought they are working – you know, the kind of collective consciousness raising which might start to make people question whether or not there just might be something flawed about the system that creates such poverty…

I also can’t quite imagine that it explored the role of Corporations such as Goldmansachs investing in the commodities futures markets leading to the inflation of food prices.

Nor, I imagine, did it feature Big Bird and friends taking a daytrip to #occupywallstreet to learn about the flaws in the capitalist system that allow the richest one percent to carry on getting richer while 17 million people in Capitalism’s fading heartland go hungry…

Finally, though I’d love to see it, I fear that also missing from the show would have been the old ‘one of these kids is doing his own thing’ skit – which could have featured fat (for dramatic affect) city financiers jetting around the world in one box while another three people suffer unemployment, undernourishment and police harrassment (for those that highlight the injustices in the system that is).

Things may be bad here in Britain, but however bad they get, I always feel relatively better when I reflect on the fact that I’m not American.

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