My New Favorite Ad on Global Warming

I discovered this ad for FightGlobalWarming.com on the Wash. As you might imagine, opinions on it have been mixed, but I like it, for reasons which are just as unsettling as the ad itself. I firmly believe that the baby boomer generation must face up to its staggering selfishness, which has saddled its children (read: us) with one terrible burden after another, including:

• A bankrupt government because of the outrageous fiscal excesses on their watch.
• An ever accelerating rise of corporatism which is steadily chipping away at our personal rights and liberties and moving us closer and closer to what Ron Paul called a “soft form of fascism.”
• A bankrupt social security system, which will result eventually in massive new taxes we will have to pay in order to support the retirements of the very greedy, selfish people who bankrupted it in the first place.
• A rapidly failing currency which will result in terrible hardship for the poor and middle class.
• And worst of all, the destruction of our environment

I suspect the only way to get the “Me Generation” to face up to the consequences of its actions is a slap in the face like this one (with many more to follow). The editors of the Wash had a somewhat different perspective, offering the following criticism for the ad:

One more thing I’d like to point out that troubles me about this ad: the use of a Caucasian blonde girl. I find this inappropriate; she’s not the one that will be affected by global warming first, it will be the children in developing countries with no food or water.

I understand and admire their desire to keep the message positive. And they are certainly correct that Third World countries will be the first to suffer (aren’t they always?). However, you have to consider your audience. The simple truth is that the Baby Boomers are used to tuning out images of suffering brown children every day. Images of starving kids from “over there” didn’t get us to take action on our atrocious agricultural trade policies, or stop buying sweatshop-made Nikes. Why should we expect such images to work now? When the victim is a cute little blonde haired blue eyed girl, however, Americans are far more apt to pay attention, right or wrong.

I am put in mind of the final argument scene in A Time to Kill:

This is a story about a little girl walking home from the grocery store one sunny afternoon. I want you to picture this little girl. Suddenly a truck races up. Two men jump out and grab her. They drag her into a nearby field and they tie her up and they rip her clothes from her body. Now they climb on. First one, then the other, raping her, shattering everything innocent and pure with a vicious thrust in a fog of drunken breath and sweat. And when they’re done, after they’ve killed her tiny womb, murdered any chance for her to have children, to have life beyond her own, they decide to use her for target practice. They start throwing full beer cans at her. They throw them so hard that it tears the flesh all the way to her bones. Then they urinate on her . . . [Then] they pick her up, throw her in the back of the truck and drive out to Foggy Creek Bridge. Pitch her over the edge. And she drops some thirty feet down to the creek bottom below. Can you see her? Her raped, beaten, broken body soaked in their urine, soaked in their semen, soaked in her blood, left to die. Can you see her? I want you to picture that little girl. Now imagine she’s white.

It’s an unfortunate fact of human nature that it’s easy to ignore suffering when it’s faced by other people, far from our eyes, different from us. And while we may hope to change this in the future, ignoring the fact of it in the present gets us nowhere. The message is too urgent to wait for us to realize at last that we’re all in this together. If being faced with the fact that your cute, blonde granddaughter will suffer terribly because of your selfishness is what it takes for you to wake up, then so be it.

I encourage you to read the Wash, though. It’s a great resource.