Vindicated? or Still A Nutjob?

I really had to chuckle with irony lately when I came across BusRadio. It took me 'way back to my days as a caring, dedicated educator who was dismissed as a crackpot for daring to suggest that Channel One and Coke in our school was not a desirable thing. My complaint then was the same one being raised now in New York, Vermont, Massachussets and South Carolina...but enough about me...for the time being.
Being a bus driver has to be almost the hardest job in the world: transporting kids to a place many of them would rather avoid at ungodly hours, then returning them home long after their classmates have plunked themselves down in front of the mass media machines (like the alliteration?) of the latest generation. Trying to keep the rowdies, the bullies, the kids taking and/or selling medication under control is a daunting task. Some, like my friend Sylvia, takes along songbooks and gets the children to sing Christmas carols during that season. Corny? Maybe, but it works for her. What she does when it's not Christmas, I don't know. She, however, like most bus drivers, has found the magic bullet: music. Someone wrote something about "soothing the savage breast" (or beast, I don't remember). It's simple: noise? no tunes. Quiet? tunes play. It seems foolproof; and BusRadio intends to make money from that idea.
Much like Sirius radio (and XM before the merger), BusRadio equips buses with $2,000 worth of equipment and plays slect songs from a playlist of about 1,000 tunes every day. There are playlists for each level (grade, middle and high) and the songs rotate daily. Seems like a good idea, especially when the company kicks in 5% of their revenue to the school systems. Aha! you say! There is a catch...and, being the kind of erudite individual who reads high-class blogs like this one, you know it. Like Channel One (which provided free television sets to schools) and Coca Cola (which provided money AND, AS A BONUS, legions of caffeine-addicted, high fructose corn syrup-fattened preteens and teens with an imprinted brand identification) BusRadio uses advertisers to provide the service, making our students unwilling participants in consumerism.
Years after I was labeled a kook, soda companies voluntarily took their product out of schools as a result of withering criticsm (not that school boards would sacrifice the money readily), and now parents are beginning to get active in their resistance to having advertisements repeated daily on the bus (disguised as entertainment designed to keep the children quiet) to impressionable kids.
Don't bother responding with all the idiotic comments like, "Well, this is one way to support the enrichment programs for our students." or "Well, without this money, we'll just have to reduce the art and music programs and give kids physical education only a couple of times a week." I've heard all of it, and those claims are bogus. "Oh sure, it's easy for YOU to say since your incredible teaching salary took all the money we could have spent on our kids." Yeah, yeah...I was the one who listened to the kids when they struggled with parents or bullies or teachers or (the list is endless). I was the one who came in early and stayed after in order to work individually with a child and took classes every summer (and paid for them out of my pocket)so I could be better for those kids. (wow...sounds a bit bitter, doesn't it?)
Selling our kids was not right years ago, and it is not right now. They have enough to do just to get through school...they should not have to pay for it,too.
Besides, most of them have an iPod and a cell phone anyway.