ABSTRACT
Browning’s Pied Piper of Hamlyn is a morality tale about the perils of greed and deceit. The people of Hamlyn offer the Piper a thousand guilders to rid their town of rats, but when the job is done palm him off with a mere fifty. They keep the rest for themselves to spend on feasting and fancy wines: “council dinners made rare havoc, With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock”. He punishes them by spiriting away all but one of their children. It is a calamity for the town.
We have learnt nothing from Browning’s fable. Our children are in far more peril than their peers in Hamlyn. They face not just one, but multiple seductive tunesters, who are armed with far more than a tin whistle and harlequin suit. Every tool of marketing, from the billboard to the internet influencer is honed with research and deployed with precision. They pursue them remorselessly from their earliest moments through every step of their childhood and adolescence. Inevitably they succeed: study after study shows that our children are easy pickings for individual industries and the toxic underlying conceit that contentment is to be found in shopping.
However, despite all the marketing, our children are proving as wise as their peers in Hamlyn. They are calling, marching, and even striking for change. The Greta Thunberg generation is fighting back. We should be profoundly grateful.
