This commercial was banned in the United States for being inappropriate:
I'm afraid I don't have the exact details of what "inappropriate" means in this case. I've unofficially heard that dying children offends the sensibilities of easily outraged television viewers (particularly parents) and should not be shown. But that would warp the message. The truth is that children do in fact die because of landmines and other war-related reasons. But because it happens half a world away, many of us have an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude.
It's unfair, it's tragic, and it's inhuman for children to get killed or maimed because they stepped a little too much to the left or right. But the U.N. had a point to make. They knew that having some high paid Hollywood actor on screen saying "landmines kill people" wouldn't be enough. In order to understand a plight, it's best to put it in terms your target audience can relate to. That's exactly what they did by showing a mine blowing up on a soccer field. The correct reaction to the message is to acknowledge that we live in a world where these horrible things happen. This is meant to spark action that enacts change, not to wrap the message in cotton batting or outright sweep it under the rug.
Children die every single day. No amount of outrage, or pretending that they don't, will make that go away.
Insight into the day to day life of a man living Child Free By Choice
How about I am just not going to watch the commercial. I can see though how depending on channel and time of airing anything with violence or death or otherwise adult material would be banned.
ReplyDeleteSigned the woman who misses watching her news every night because the world is too messed up to explain to my 4 year old right now as I want him to be a kid as long as he can.
I saw nothing inappropriate about the commercial, either. No worse than all the highly sexualized and other inappropriate things that children are exposed to through T.V., movies, video games and magazines. Most of the stuff children view these days or hear through peers is often 10 times worse than this; this is less than tame, but it did serve to get the message across.
ReplyDelete