title:  Viral Video Captures The Importance Of Investing In Children
text: Released in September 2013, this short video about the power of Giving instantly went viral. Once you ve seen it, you ll understand why.Produced by TrueMove H in Thailand, the three-minute video reminds us of how taking care of others comes full circle, touching our own lives in ways that we cannot begin to foresee.It s especially relevant in today s political climate, where the conversation is too often dominated by Ayn-Rand-worshiping right-wing politicians, accompanied by a choir of religious leaders who feed the masses a poison concoction of fear and hate, served up in a glittering bowl of egotism and self-righteousness.At the beginning of the video, a young boy has been caught stealing. An outraged, unmerciful shopkeeper is in the process of shoving him around in the street, screaming and ranting as she does so.But the owner of a nearby cafe intervenes. He gives the shopkeeper money out of his own pocket to cover what the boy stole. He then sends his young daughter into his own store for vegetable soup, after learning the boy s mother is sick.For those who haven t seen how the video ends, watch it below, courtesy of Elon Iva on YouTube.(*You may want to have a box of tissues nearby.)In a larger context, the story told on this video is one of social responsibility.For those on the right who are constantly asking  Why should I have to Whether we re talking about giving to the poor or investing in public education, there s a message in this video that we all should pay attention to.The right promotes the false idea that a society full of Ayn-Rand individualists can be healthy and functional. According to that way of thinking, other people s lives aren t our responsibility. We don t need to invest healthcare or support programs that  enable the freeloading poor.  The only person that matters is  me, myself and I. What the right consistently fails to understand is that when you live in a society, every person is connected in some way or another.The video especially speaks to the need to invest in public education. While it was once seen as a  Christian mission  to make sure that every child has equal access to education, today s right wing Christians view education as an  evil.  Yet, just a few decades ago the Christian church believed that every child should learn to read and write. How else can a child read the Bible?But the church is now a corporation, and as we can clearly see by examining  Christian corporations  involved in things like educaAs the video shows, investing in a child s future is anything but a  waste.  It s an investment in our own future, and in the future of our society.The school to prison pipeline that we ve set up in the United States is costing our society hundreds of billions of dollars every single year. Instead of investing in the future of our country s most vulnerable citizens, we cut funding for the programs that benefit kids the most.At the same time we create more and more laws, with harsher and harsher punishments, pouring more and more of our tax dollars into the prison industrial complex, while taking more and more away from public education.What we see in our society today is the result of our decade s long experiment with right wing  tough on crime  policies and Ayn-Randian ideals of individualism. It doesn t work.We have fewer and fewer students graduating with the skills needed to become doctors or Scientists or mathematicians. The number of students enrolling in college is also consistently declining. At the same time, every year in the U.S. more than two million young people enter into the juvenile justice system. The majority of these  criminals,  95 percent, are not arrested for violent crimes.Last week teachers working for the Detroit Public School System released shocking pictures of the deplorable conditions inside the city s schools. If we need a vision of America under the influence of right wing ideology, we can look to Detroit to see the future.Educating and caring for children used to be a priority to Americans. But that system has been replaced with a new system which prefers mass incarceration.This video is an important reminder that when we invest in our society s children, somewhere down the road we will reap the benefits. On the other hand, when we throw children away because of petty crimes, we re throwing away possibilities that we may not even be able to imagine.*Featured image credit: video scree capture TrueMove H via YouTube