In the NY Times Business Day section there’s a long feature about the explosion of private schools catering to teenagers with behavioral problems. It’s in the Business Day section because some big name investors see it as a sure fire way to make some big cash. It makes sense: there’s no shortage of over-working, wealthy parents not willing to spend time with their children, but more than willing to throw down 50 grand a year so that someone else will. And like one investor says, “all indications are that the market is still growing.”

Of course, is you’ve spent a good deal of time with over-working, wealthy, and ambitious families like I have, you know why the children have their behavioral problems in the first place. Rich parents didn’t get rich by chance – they’ve got a keen sense of incentives, assets, and liabilities. And – subconsciously or not – they always commodify love into something that is earned and lost, bought and sold. You can almost see the formula working itself out in their heads as they argue over $30 plates of spaghetti: “honey, I’d be willing to buy you this, if you’d be willing to do that.” It’s a great way to manage businesses and a great way to fuck up kids.

In the spring of 2000, after having spent the last seven months studying in Kathmandu, I started school at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. There was still a lingering ambition of wanting to study physics, but after such a thought-provoking time in Nepal (the last 6 weeks of which were spent high up in the Himalaya), I convinced myself that a double major in philosophy and outdoor education was the path for me. There was a vision and that vision was me as a full time forest ranger living in a lonely cabin with crowded bookshelves, which at 19-years-old was all I wanted out of life.

So on a cold January morning – with the teeth-clenching-trip of New Year’s Eve rubbing off – I waved goodbye to San Diego’s marine layered beaches and set off for Flagstaff’s mile high, snow-covered mountains in my sturdy Saturn full of mountaineering equipment and cardboard boxes full of cheap pirated paperbacks from India. That semester I spent my study time in the dark corner of Macy’s Cafe listening to live jazz and reading up on the P’s and Q’s of logic. My social time, though was spent very far away from the philosophy department, which was saturated with hippie hypocrisy.

Instead I fell in with the Outdoor Education students – some of the most beautiful people, inside and out, I’ve ever met. We’d go on hikes together, picking up cigarette butts and beer cans the whole way. We’d go on multi-pitch rock climbs and get naked on top of Sedona’s sandstone spires, just to let our dinglies dangle triumphantly over the tourists below. We’d have giant bon fires out in the middle of the forest and run around naked in the dancing shadows of the flames. (nudity seemed to play an integral part in our scene)

When Allen Ginsberg says, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness,” these are the individuals I remember. They never did wrong and were consistently striving to do right. Our inspiration and energy source was mother nature herself and if we ever felt disheartened by the front page news, a simple walk in the woods was all it took to recharge our constitutions.

I ended up returning to San Diego though and when my friends did in fact graduate from NAU with a bachelors in Outdoor Education, they were all presented with the same singular job offer: teaching troubled youth on “outdoor therapy excursions,” also known as babysitting. The kind souls that they are, they figured this would be an ideal opportunity to make a positive difference in the lives of future generations which are steadily losing contact with the natural world around them. We all had a concrete faith in the healing powers of natural environments and surely these young people would, in time, have that “ah-ha” moment.

Instead though, these beautiful people entered a sickened world of upper-upper class suburban brats used to wheeling and dealing their way towards a love-starved attention circus whose ironic facade was inevitably to prove that they didn’t need anybody, not mother nature and certainly not a bunch of naturalists who do things like read John Muir in their free time.

Troubled rich kid psychology isn’t something that’s “cured” in three weeks around a bunch of camp fires. Which is why “troubled youth counseling” is really an appealing name for “nightmare babysitting without showers.” There is an ABC reality show Brat Camp, which documents precisely that. It’s become obvious that showing the unhappy everyday minutiae of rich people (ie. Osbournes) is a sure hit on prime time and Brat Camp wants its share.

Of course the big name investors in the article are ecstatic about the news because any attention is good attention and when troubled teenagers see their (now famous) peers having sex in the bushes at some troubled youth camp, they’re gonna threaten their parents with drug use and crime records until they too get sent off to some $50 grand a year program.

Though this past weekend I was reminded of just how much I’ve been missing the mountains, I’m glad I didn’t go through with outdoor education to wind up working with one of these programs, because I would’ve never had the patience. I do believe that in 90% of the cases, the parents are to blame (sorry parents – I know you say you’re trying (buying) everything – but look harder), but if some rich kid comes to me complaining about their woes, you know what I’d do? I’d buy them a one way ticket to the Old Delhi train station with nothing more than 100 rupees in their pocket and I’d tell them to have fun. A hell of a lot cheaper and it’d actually work.

Which brings me to the one point I actually want make. According to the article, annual revenues of the estimated 100,000 American students attending these “troubled youth academies” now total at least $1 billion dollars.

That’s a lot of money. Which is why I hearby demand $10,000 from one of these hot shot investors to fly out to a major Indian city where I will find a group of 30 or 40 middle class Indian kids with a good command of English (they all do these days anyway) and get them to all start blogging in an exclusive myspace or livejournal-like community. Then I’ll go to one of these rich kid academies and get 30 or 40 of them to start doing the same. Part of the rich kids’ curriculum will be writing about their own lives and commenting on the entries of the Indian peers. That way the rich kids can blog about how they’re cutting their arms because some gothic-indie band told them to and the Indian kids can blog about how they’re studying four hours a night- when the electricity is working – to get a perfect SAT score just in case they’re chosen in the US visa lottery.

If ABC wants, I’ll let them follow me around and they can make a reality show comparing the lives of the rich American kids and the middle class Indian kids and the relationships that develop between them.

So go ahead and leave me a comment explaining how I should pick up the 10 grand.

Now, for two completely unrelated items. First off, I think all of the women on the new ads for Dove’s “campaign for real beauty” are attractive. More than attractive, I think they are sexy. They have curves, they’re muscular, they’re reasonably athletic, and they shine. Hopefully it’s spreading a new trend. But let’s be fair and draw a line between “real beauty” and real obesity. Eavesdropper that I am, I often overhear women who clearly need to lose a good 40 pounds complaining that they live in a society that glorifies anorexia. That is true. But it’s true that we also live in a society with a major obesity problem. So hopefully encouraging a realistic ideal waistline (like Dove’s models) will get more people to start exercising and stop starving themselves.

Second, reading through the Wall Street Journal’s international section (what’s up with no Bug Me Not love for the WSJ?), I came across two articles on socialist economic policy – one which I am totally for and the other which I am totally against. In Venezuela, banks are required by the government to “devote as much as 29% of all loans to activities such as home mortgages, agricultural loans, and microloans to small companies.” The article goes on to say:

“Strict capital controls have helped increase outstanding liquidity in the economy and have prompted a rise in bank deposits. Mr Chavez imposed capital and price controls on the economy in early 2003 to stem capital flight. The resulting trapped liquidity has helped push down interest rates and has helped spur an economic recovery. The Venezuelan economy is expected to expand at least 5% in 2005.”

The second was about how the Indian government has backed off from privatizing 13 state-owned companies. We’re not talking health care here – these are manufacturing, aluminum, and petroleum companies which have no business being run by the state. Government control of companies should be kept to an absolute minimum and is only necessary when profit motives directly harm either people or the environment – like health care. You could also make the argument that state ownership over petroleum companies is necessary for environmental reasons, but the Mexican nationalized Pemex, which has had numerous oil spills this year and is a business disaster, gives plenty of reason to regulate environmental standards by laws and not by messy state ownership.