Go Off, Ms. Rachel
Volume 3, Issue 11
Some content is hard to avoid, irrespective of its quality or utility.
Everyone knows, for example, the words to the song “Who Let the Dogs Out,” even though there’s not an actual human on earth who likes it. When you have kids, whole genres of stuff that you didn’t even know existed start showing up in your life, and within those eddies of information exist new, inescapable ephemera: Cocomelon clips, Paw Patrol figurines, the melody to the song “Baby Shark,” and of course, the woman to whom we all owe child support payments, Ms. Rachel.
For the uninitiated (eg. the childless), Rachel Accurso is a YouTube mega star whose speech-pathology inspired approach to making educational videos for little kids spawned a media empire. Her videos have hundreds of millions of views, and she - along with Cocomelon, Blippi, Meekah, Danny Go, and other newly-minted household names - commands a striking amount of our toddlers’ collective attention.
On the one hand, I harbor existential concerns about how much screen time our little kids experience; on the other hand, Ms. Rachel doesn’t make addictive trash content (*cough* Moonbug *cough*) like some of her peers, so I have a soft spot for her.
And then, earlier this week, she did this:
As some of you know, dunking on Mayor Eric Adams is one of my kinks, so I was pleased to see someone with a platform as prodigious as Rachel’s stand up to our clown chief executive’s disgraceful plan to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the city’s early childhood budget. As a New York City parent waiting for a 3k assignment, I am appalled that our city continues to dump more and more money into a failed system of prisons and police harassment, while systematically eviscerating services for families with children.
More than that, though, as a longtime activist for social, racial, and educational justice, I know how rare it is for people with large media platforms to take a serious position on municipal budget issues. Sometimes folks build fame for the sake of having it; others take more seriously the responsibility that accrues from the eyeballs they attract
Ms. Rachel, at least for now, appears to reside in the latter category, and I’m happy to have her there. Go off, Ms. Rachel. More of this, please.
Spot on and thanks for sharing.