Belgium, the country whose King Leopold II actually owned the Congo and used it as a personal plantation for rubber and ivory, is running a series of ads from UNICEF to demonstrate the horrors of war.
How to convey these horrors? Footage of child soldiers in Liberia? Images of atrocities from Darfur? First-person accounts of northern Ugandan kids known as night commuters?
Nope, the ad agency, which sadly is probably right in assuming that all of this stuff has little, if any, impact on viewers any more, decided to go in a totally different direction. Smurfs.
I wish I was kidding.
Now I'm certainly not against raising money for UNICEF; I think they do great work (and I always give the kids with UNICEF boxes extra candy when they come trick-or-treating). And I'm definitely not against raising awareness of what war is doing to kids around the world who, owing to some cosmic geographic crap shoot, were born into war zones.
But it is depressing to think that the only way to shock people into paying attention is by carpet-bombing a Smurf village.
I'm less worried about what these images will do to kids [after all, I can remember being a kid and rooting for somebody to silence that stupid singing] than what it says about adults.
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