Bad Ad

(Note: NYconneXions does not take responsibility for the writer’s stand and viewpoints!!!)

There’s a new TV advertisement on the airwaves of Singapore. No, it does not involve pseudo-gay Japanese male actors applying generous layers of wax all over their luscious locks. Nor does it have anything to do with the sad guy with a leg sawn off and a dead buddy due to a speeding incident on a motorbike.

It’s got to do with the environment.

This quartet of teenagers tells us about the dangers of a particular lifestyle that is “bad for the environment”. A little part of me told me, when I first saw this ad, that I knew this was going to happen.

All great social movements, whether misguided or not, need to influence the youth of the target population in order to have any long term effect. Remember the Hitler Youth knives? Remember the deep red arm patches of young men and women in the Communist China during the Great Cultural Revolution? You get my point.

So this has finally trickled down to this: a prepackaged, over condensed, sugar-coated and very modern advertisement targeted to tell our youth, as in Singapore, the dangers of Global Warming etc. Global Warming the phenomenon has finally gained sufficient foothold in this little snub on the map to warrant an Ad made specifically for kids like you and me.

I must admit that the Chinese girl in that Ad is kind of hot. She’s got a nice clean hair style, the kind that runs oh so slightly till the curve of her back and with a little going around her shoulders, so when she moves her head its like a little of her perky torso is trying to speak with you. There’s the cute lips that makes the perfect little purse when she finishes a sentence. And most importantly, a dangerously svelte body that just seems to curve inwards at the right locales to allow for a firm grip during…

…a warm embrace.

I wonder if that colorful little top she’s got adhered on said body is made of fair-trade cotton that gives small scale farmers a chance to live in an industry overwhelmed by unscrupulous mass producers of “stylish clothing”. Or maybe the top is just another over-priced, “made in {insert poor third-world nation here}” piece of disposable fashion. I can just see the hands of a hundred badly paid Vietnamese women’s skinny hands delicately seething their fingers through the fabric of that cute little top, making sure that boss-man will have his orders on time, or else there’s not food for the kids tonight.

The worst part of any movement, whether misguided or not, is when enthusiastic kids comes into the picture. And what a movement this is. I may be misguided here, and many might agree that I am, but it seems from my observations that the majority of the voices made by the so-called “environmentally-conscious youth” comes from a bunch of relatively rich, upper-middle class kids who thinks they are changing the world when they go for a trip to build a toilet in the middle of Cambodia or rural Thailand.

The 20/80 rule comes into mind. Though the Pareto principle was never intended in this context, but let me do a little modification if Joseph M. Juran doesn’t mind. 20 percent of the population makes 80 percent of the noise. And the cacophony of voices on this Global Warming issue, including my own, makes up but a small percentile of the true overall opinion.

In the Ad, they implied something that mirrors the stuff that a lot of people these days say: the planet is going down the toilet, we’re like a savior, and it’s our responsibility that the planet’s going to die… so on and so forth. These same folks seem to be the same who worry about insecticides in our food, killing germs with Dettol and radioactive waves from our cell phones, saving endangered spices. The list goes on.

Everyone is so arrogant these days; “Saving the Planet” seems to be such a nice thing to say. But let’s face it; we can’t even look after ourselves yet, what with our worrying over “Emo” kids cutting themselves to whether a homoerotic love scene in a video game will disrupt social order. How can any reasonable person expect we can “Save the Planet”?

I’m really tired of this hypocrisy. I truly am.

Seriously, is there anything wrong with the planet? Nope. The planet is fine. A little piece of rock floating around a big ball of flame in the universe… The planet is perfectly fine, and she’s been through a lot more than what we’re throwing at her now. Think about it. The planet’s been here 4 and a half billion years, with us being in recorded history for around 6000 years, and the industrial age lasting a mere 200 years. Trust me when I say that the planet has been through a lot worse.

She’s been hit by huge rocks from space, got her landmasses shifting to create huge landforms like the Himalayas and the Grand Canyon. Solar flairs, sunspots, volcanic activity etc…

And we have the conceit to believe we are going to really permanently put this immense piece of art at risk?

There’s nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is A-Okay; it’s the people who are paddling up a river with a fork here.

The idea that we are “Saving the Planet” is not only conceited and overly arrogant, it is also one that obviously does not appeal to some people, namely those who think it’s alright and that we should just let things be and die. This blatantly arrogant view on saving our own skin as “Saving the Planet” is not only one that represents the wrong ideal on how we should really view the problem – one of survival, it also aggravates the issue by allowing for many to be more willing to turn a blind eye, simply because it appeals to some intuitively unreachable morality that we should “Save the Planet”.

We are in a lot of trouble. And we will always be in a lot of trouble.

That is all we need to tell ourselves. The planet doesn’t need saving, we need saving from our own stupidity. So please try not to arm our youth with some overly simplistic moral outlook – the lack of objective realism here is going to produce yet another misguided generation that’s going to make life miserable for a future generation. Remember, the advent of Industrialism was supposed to cure us of hard work and misery – a lot of good that ideal did us.

But for the sake of eye candy, just don’t remove the Ad yet. Though there are no lessons that we can really learn, we can however, admire something else.

By Wu Xiaoyu