TOTAL LICENSING
In the latest of his regular columns for Total Licensing, Gary Pope, CEO and Co-Founder of Kids Industries and Children’s Commissioner for Products of Change focuses on how stories are our mechanism for understanding an ever-changing world.
“With great power comes great responsibility” I’ve been watching too much news. I think we all have; unless of course you’ve done the right thing and deleted all your apps, banned newspapers and allowed the kids full control of the telly for the singular purpose of spending robux. I’ve found this noise all around us addictive and debilitating. The confluence of information, claim and counter-claim, obfuscation and geopolitical flip-flop is utterly exhausting. There’s much talk of all this being for a better future. BS. It’s about the moment and little else because our world is now transactional and the quarterly report is all that matters. The thing that bothers me most is what happens next. I’m a dad of two. One is 21, the other 16 and they are just getting going. And yet, by any metric, it looks like they will have it tougher and perhaps scarier than we did. And I did nuclear drills in elementary school. Whatever decisions those with the Power-Sticks make (or fail to make), there is one immovable truth: our greatest responsibility is to the next generation. A civilisation can be judged by how it treats its children, and for me, one of the underpinnings of a healthy childhood is story. The sharing, telling and listening to fundamental truths that have been shared for millennia is what shapes societies, cultures, and the development of our species. This industry, the licensing industry, share and tells stories.
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