Thursday, July 18, 2013
The Kids Are All Right
I didn't follow the recent controversy that surrounded a Cheerio commercial, but apparently it showed an interracial couple whose little girl wanted her daddy to be healthy, so she dumped a box of Cheerios on his chest, so his heart would stay healthy.
That's the whole commercial.
The YouTube site, according to the interview below, exploded with racial slurs and invective so horrible that they had to shut the comment section down. The comments blasted Cheerios for the ad because it showed a normal family that happened to feature an African-American daddy and a non-African-American mommy, and the comment section seethed with the most disgusting racist language and slurs imaginable.
In this video, someone interviews a number of children of various ages and backgrounds to solicit their opinions of the whole controversy. The interviews with these adorable and wise children give me hope and much consolation after a week of rancor and blistering enmity.
The kids are more than all right; the kids are beautiful, and it is their generation that will, finally, fulfill this country's greatest promise--equality for all.
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11 comments:
Not surprising. I've gotten into some pretty nasty back and forth with white supremacists on YouTube.
They seem to particularly infest that environment, for some reason.
I saw a lot of far-right outrage about this on one site I sometimes read. They saw it as "pro-race-mixing propaganda" produced, of course, by a diabolical Jewish plot. But most regular people liked it.
I LOVED that commercial, and it is the only commercial that I watch from beginning to end (all the other commercials become an opportunity to channel surf) because it was such an endearing message...
I will also say that the race of the mother or father NEVER registered with me....
Without this post I would not have known, even after seeing this commercial at least 10/15 times...
Tao,
It didn't register with the majority of people but the fringe seems to get the most attention.
Far right and far left are not that much different just way outside the norm and both have their extremists.
A) More open ended rather than closed ended questions should have been asked.
2) There was some indoctrination going on. Fortunately it was good for the most part.
4) And I hope you're right about the next generation Shaw. I'm hopeful as I see the change in our 4 yr. old grandson.
RN: "There was some indoctrination going on."
That means the kids were being told to accept a partisan or ideological point of view.
I've watched the video at least 4 times. I heard the interviewer ask questions, then I heard him explain to the kids why people disliked the commercial. The interviewer also told them about how bad the comments got. He also asked them their opinions on interracial marriages.
I never heard the interviewer tell any of the kids what to think or tell them his political or ideological ideas and make them accept them. That's what indoctrination means.
Can you point out where the "indoctrination" is?
You did an adequate job of doing so.
That's not indoctrination.
Go look it up in the dictionary.
Your interptetation, fine by me. As long as you don't attempt to force it upon me.
The commercial, itself, is adorable. Silly -- but adorable.
It would never have occurred to me to see "controversy" there.
The brouhaha ABOUT the commercial, which I have NOT seen, because I don't waste my precious time pondering ugliness, stupidity and things deliberately designed to provoke ire and unrest, is ugly as sin.
Railing on about it, however, only EXACERBATES, COMPOUNDS, and further PROPAGATES the problem.
Les called the questioning methods in the video "indoctrination" -- a charge Ms Shaw, vigorously denied.
In a court of law,however, a good lawyer would object to those questions as "leading, argumentative, and calling for a conclusion by the witness." In other words in a formal trial the use of such questioning methods would be impermissible.
Online discussion -- or should I say "exchanges of acrimony?" -- in no way resembles a court of law, except in one regard:
An honest search for Truth invariably gets preempted by the desire to prevail no matter what such a victory may cost.
Mr. Free Thinke,
There isn't an iota of "acrimony" in this post, nor in the discussions in the comments.
I have to chuckle at your contrariness in this discussion, something you habitually attack our friend "Ducky's Here" for doing over at conservative blogs.
As I said, I did not follow the controversy, but a dear friend sent me this video as a means of showing me how hopeful we can be about the children.
You and RN reacted to it as though it were a court room exercise.
It wasn't. The undercurrent in both RN's and your comments, IMO, seems to be that the children were somehow tricked into giving their honest opinions of the commercial, which was that they saw no reason whatsoever for any controversy.
Instead of being happy to see this refreshing example of innocence and honesty, both you and RN attach some nefarious (liberal?) agenda by the interviewer to it.
When people like Ducky do this, you become enraged and call him all manner of things for doing so.
Can you not see you've done exactly that here?
This isn't meant as a rebuke, but simply trying to get you to understand that you rarely allow people with differing points of view to express them without finding some sort of unforgivable malice in them.
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