DOUG IRELAND, DIRELAND - A recent Sesame Street broadcast taught kids that any societal attempt to have a more equitable distribution of wealth is a bad thing. A research vice president for the Chicago Urban League and a regular Z-Net contributor, Paul Street describes the broadcast:
"The morning's lesson was on the just and inviolable nature of socioeconomic inequity and the sanctity of private property and possessive individualism. At the point I clicked on the program, two very concerned and mature adults --- a black man and a black woman, both in their 40s it appeared --- were listening with raised eyebrows to a blue puppet animal ('Cookie Monster' perhaps) who had just designated himself 'Cookie-Hood.' 'Cookie-Hood' was a play on Robin Hood.
"'Cookie Hood' had just come to the alarming (for him) realization that 'some people have lots more cookies than they need' while 'other people have no cookies at all.' "The solution, 'Cookie-Hood' announced, is to take the surplus cookies away from the wealthy few and give them away to the poor, cookieless many.
"The two adults were not pleased. 'That,' the father figure sternly intoned, 'is stealing.' And 'stealing is wrong,' he elaborated, 'because it means taking something that doesn't belong to you.' No room, of course, in the SS script for why the cookieless exist in the first place -- no sense of justice in the demand of equal cookies for all.
"'Cookie-Hood' felt sad and ashamed. He thought he'd been doing something good and just, but really he'd been doing something wrong. He'd been stealing cookies that didn't belong to him. Bad cookie puppet.
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