The lights went out on Sesame Street this week, and nobody in Washington bothered to hold a funeral.
ABC's parent company announced Wednesday it is shuttering the network's news division and gutting its children's programming slate—a move executives dressed up in the bloodless language of "strategic realignment." Translation: another American institution just died, and we're all supposed to scroll past it on our phones like nothing happened.
Let's be clear about what's actually being lost here. For fifty-five years, ABC's Saturday morning block was the first place millions of American kids learned to read, count, and share. It was where a generation of latchkey children parked themselves with a bowl of cereal while their parents worked double shifts. It was free. It was everywhere. It didn't require a subscription, a login, or a credit card on file.
Now it's gone, folded into a streaming bundle nobody asked for, behind a paywall most families can't justify.
This isn't a business story. It's a moral one.
We have quietly accepted that the things that once bound us together—shared broadcasts, common reference points, a baseline of facts we all agreed on—are now luxury goods. Want your kid to learn their ABCs? That'll be $14.99 a month. Want the news? Pick your silo and pay to be told you're right. The town square has been subdivided into gated communities, and the gatekeepers charge admission.
And here's the part nobody wants to say out loud: we let it happen. Every time we shrugged at another local paper closing, another newsroom gutted, another public institution sold to the highest bidder, we taught the market a lesson. The lesson was that community doesn't pencil out. The lesson was that the only things worth funding are the things that can be monetized. The lesson was that your neighbor's kid doesn't matter unless that kid is a customer.
The executives will be fine. They'll land somewhere with a golden parachute and a consulting gig. The anchors will pivot to podcasts. The shareholders will get their bump. But the six-year-old in a rented apartment whose mom can't afford another streaming service? She just lost her classroom. And she'll never know what she missed, because you can't mourn a thing you never had.
This is how a society collapses—not with a bang, not with tanks in the streets, but with a quiet press release on a Wednesday afternoon. One institution at a time, one paywall at a time, one "we're sorry for any inconvenience" at a time. We don't fall apart all at once. We just keep selling off the pieces until there's nothing left to hold onto.
So go ahead and call it progress. Call it innovation. Call it whatever helps you sleep at night. But when your grandchildren ask why nobody knows the same songs anymore, why nobody trusts the same facts, why nobody feels like they belong to anything bigger than themselves, you'll have your answer.
It started the day Sesame Street went quiet, and we didn't say a word.