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(no subject)
It's gotta be the witching hour. I flipped the TV on, here at 4:47 am, only so's I could rewind my B5 tape and curl up in bed with said, and in the space of one commercial break (during the Sharon Osborne show, guest tonight Khandi Alexander, whom I'm very fond of, who taught Sharon Osborne how to hack open a human limb a la CSI: Miami but anyone worth her salt knows Khandi Alexander from Newsradio anyhow) I was offended exactly three times, which is a lot of offense in the middle of the night.
All three of the spots were PSAs, or, more accurately, funded spots for watchdog groups that like to bandy around words like "family values" and "tolerance" in this incredibly twisted way that makes me want to hide under the bed.
Spot #1: Guy's talking about his son, my son loved football, he had dreams of being the quarterback, but his dreams were shattered...by suicide. Which is, I was making the bed, and I looked up to doublecheck and make sure I got it right. Like suicide had snuck up on this otherwise normal football-playing kid and the father was lashing out, looking for someone to blame. Which struck me as a hugely cavalier attitude toward mental health, and incredibly counterintuitive in an ad that's supposed to educate about suicide and teenagers at risk. Point being, suicide didn't shatter this kid's dreams; presumably this kid's dreams were shattered far earlier than that, and couching it in an ad where the father didn't notice, to illustrate that suicide's a risk for seemingly "normal" kids, yes, but that wasn't the punchline here, the punchline was "suicide shatters dreams," which, I don't know. Seemed to seriously downplay any number of emotional events that took place between football and suicide, and any number of mental health issues that deserve more scrutiny than the too-little too-late fundraising party line.
Spot #2: Hell, I forgot spot #2, I got so worked up about spot #1. I remember spot #3, though.
Spot #3: An MTV-style series of quick fades on a white background: pacifier, multicolored glow sticks, lollipops, teddy bear. "These items seem innocent," the ad tells me, "but they are indications of a kid using Ecstacy." And this is, again, a tribute to my own drug war issues where I understand the problems and I'm all for education, warning signs, and responsible parenthood but this struck me as paranoia in extremis, not to mention a kind of social profiling. If we start nailing everyone with a teddybear we play hell with civil liberties -- even for teenagers -- and, worse, we strip the teddy bear of any innocence it once had.
It reminds me of something that happened to me in high school. My friend Ela collected spoons, those little souvenir spoons you get at souvenir shops, between the bobbleheads and the snowglobes, you know, with "Welcome to Hawaii" or a picture of the Parthenon on 'em. Somehow, and damned if I remember how, a teacher stumbled on Ela's spoon collection and had her hauled in to the counselor, insisting that the only reason anyone would have spoons of that size would be to cook crack cocaine.
Two problems there, and the civil liberties one is the larger one. The other one might be slightly colored by the fact that I saw Thirteen last night, but here's the rub. You call in a kid on the precipice between innocence and maturity and attribute to her innocent artifacts a sinister (but somehow more mature) motive, and what you get is a kid almost wishing she were cooking crack cocaine on those spoons, because it's a hell of a lot cooler than spoons for their own sake.
So here I am, worried about the kind of education these parents are receiving, waking up for work, watching Sharon Osborne. I think drug awareness, and mental health awareness, has so far to go, particularly when you're talking about teenagers because there's nothing in the world as volatile as a fifteen year old. You play fast and loose with these kids and they go off like loaded guns.
Ads like this make me want to go into public policy, if for no other reason that I feel like I could write better awareness copy.
I'm torn, plagued with a good dose of liberal guilt, feeling the same kind of unfair hostility I feel for public school teachers who do a crappy job. It's such important work, no glory, shit pay, but at the end of the day I still get upset when it's handled clumsily.
How do you educate a teenager without insulting her? How do you educate a parent without teaching them to randomly accuse, which inevitably drives the kid farther away? How do you make people realize that mental health and drugs are everybody's problem, that they don't just sneak up on you while you're watching Sharon Osborne? What do we do?
ETA: You know which ones I liked? Were the ones with the kid with the leather jacket and the safety pin through his nose and the ridiculous hair, and his mom gives him a loving tousle and asks him where he'll be tonight, who's gonna be there, when he'll be home. And he tells her, and she gives him a kiss and lets him go and the copy says something to the end of: "Let your kids be who they are. Just know what they're doing."
See how that ad didn't say "a safety pin through the nose and a fucked-up haircut are indications of drugs and suicide!" Don't you feel like that gives the kid so much more respect -- and the parent so much more respect -- and is far more likely to promote a healthy and honest relationship between kids and their parents and stop this bullshit before it starts?
Am I crazy, here?
All three of the spots were PSAs, or, more accurately, funded spots for watchdog groups that like to bandy around words like "family values" and "tolerance" in this incredibly twisted way that makes me want to hide under the bed.
Spot #1: Guy's talking about his son, my son loved football, he had dreams of being the quarterback, but his dreams were shattered...by suicide. Which is, I was making the bed, and I looked up to doublecheck and make sure I got it right. Like suicide had snuck up on this otherwise normal football-playing kid and the father was lashing out, looking for someone to blame. Which struck me as a hugely cavalier attitude toward mental health, and incredibly counterintuitive in an ad that's supposed to educate about suicide and teenagers at risk. Point being, suicide didn't shatter this kid's dreams; presumably this kid's dreams were shattered far earlier than that, and couching it in an ad where the father didn't notice, to illustrate that suicide's a risk for seemingly "normal" kids, yes, but that wasn't the punchline here, the punchline was "suicide shatters dreams," which, I don't know. Seemed to seriously downplay any number of emotional events that took place between football and suicide, and any number of mental health issues that deserve more scrutiny than the too-little too-late fundraising party line.
Spot #2: Hell, I forgot spot #2, I got so worked up about spot #1. I remember spot #3, though.
Spot #3: An MTV-style series of quick fades on a white background: pacifier, multicolored glow sticks, lollipops, teddy bear. "These items seem innocent," the ad tells me, "but they are indications of a kid using Ecstacy." And this is, again, a tribute to my own drug war issues where I understand the problems and I'm all for education, warning signs, and responsible parenthood but this struck me as paranoia in extremis, not to mention a kind of social profiling. If we start nailing everyone with a teddybear we play hell with civil liberties -- even for teenagers -- and, worse, we strip the teddy bear of any innocence it once had.
It reminds me of something that happened to me in high school. My friend Ela collected spoons, those little souvenir spoons you get at souvenir shops, between the bobbleheads and the snowglobes, you know, with "Welcome to Hawaii" or a picture of the Parthenon on 'em. Somehow, and damned if I remember how, a teacher stumbled on Ela's spoon collection and had her hauled in to the counselor, insisting that the only reason anyone would have spoons of that size would be to cook crack cocaine.
Two problems there, and the civil liberties one is the larger one. The other one might be slightly colored by the fact that I saw Thirteen last night, but here's the rub. You call in a kid on the precipice between innocence and maturity and attribute to her innocent artifacts a sinister (but somehow more mature) motive, and what you get is a kid almost wishing she were cooking crack cocaine on those spoons, because it's a hell of a lot cooler than spoons for their own sake.
So here I am, worried about the kind of education these parents are receiving, waking up for work, watching Sharon Osborne. I think drug awareness, and mental health awareness, has so far to go, particularly when you're talking about teenagers because there's nothing in the world as volatile as a fifteen year old. You play fast and loose with these kids and they go off like loaded guns.
Ads like this make me want to go into public policy, if for no other reason that I feel like I could write better awareness copy.
I'm torn, plagued with a good dose of liberal guilt, feeling the same kind of unfair hostility I feel for public school teachers who do a crappy job. It's such important work, no glory, shit pay, but at the end of the day I still get upset when it's handled clumsily.
How do you educate a teenager without insulting her? How do you educate a parent without teaching them to randomly accuse, which inevitably drives the kid farther away? How do you make people realize that mental health and drugs are everybody's problem, that they don't just sneak up on you while you're watching Sharon Osborne? What do we do?
ETA: You know which ones I liked? Were the ones with the kid with the leather jacket and the safety pin through his nose and the ridiculous hair, and his mom gives him a loving tousle and asks him where he'll be tonight, who's gonna be there, when he'll be home. And he tells her, and she gives him a kiss and lets him go and the copy says something to the end of: "Let your kids be who they are. Just know what they're doing."
See how that ad didn't say "a safety pin through the nose and a fucked-up haircut are indications of drugs and suicide!" Don't you feel like that gives the kid so much more respect -- and the parent so much more respect -- and is far more likely to promote a healthy and honest relationship between kids and their parents and stop this bullshit before it starts?
Am I crazy, here?
no subject
I liked our drug prevention in school though, it was very non-alarmist but gave you the facts. Like we got these very long lists of banned substances and their various street names and in what forms they would appear when sold, and a somewhat shorter list of legal substances that are (ab)used as drugs, and then what long and short term effects they have (are they physically addictive or only psychologically, how high are their addictive properties, are they stimulants, sedatives, halucinogens..., do they have the potential for effects like flashbacks etc), and what health risks if any do they have (like do they cause organ damage directly or only through secondary consequences of addiction). Before that I hadn't even known half these, and it explained to me what kinds of drugs did what.
That way the anti-drug message was believable, like they didn't tell you that something horrible would happen to you if you tried pot, but when a teacher told about how some of his friends who used pot frequently over years changed in their personality that was taken seriously.
Also while the main message was "don't use drugs" there was also some information about being sensible when using recreational drugs (both legal and illegal), like stressing how important it is to be really sure what you take, mentioning dehydration risks when using party drugs, because the body doesn't notice thirst like when sober... and stuff like that. Just like they told you to drink responsible while pointing out the risks of alcohol abuse and addiction (here the legal drinking age for beer is 16, only beverages with more alcohol are restricted to over 18, so it was perfectly legal and expected for students in their final two high school years to drink alcohol if they wanted to).
I guess I liked that it didn't have the somewhat counterintuitive message of so many campaigns that seems to be "Say no. Something horrible will happen to you if you use drugs only once! You will die!" Even I found those ridiculous, and that though personally I'm rather anti-drugs, so much so that I never tried any, and don't even drink anything. (I've always been scared of substances messing with my brain and with alcohol also scared of addiction because of family history.)
no subject
Until I noticed that all my friends who did were totally fine and not going insane or dying or losing their jobs or being addicts. If you know responsible, sensible people who are doing things, it REALLY kills the alarmist message forever.
That said, I know NO ONE who is insane enough to touch anything physically addictive. That is one thing you really should JUST SAY NO to.