Special awareness campaigns are really starting to piss me off, even though I just ranted about how I think gender identity ought to be part of the core curriculum in schools. I’m tired of hearing about child abuse and elder abuse and animal abuse and environmental abuse and abuse of the mentally ill and homosexual abuse and gender abuse and…I mean, we all know that basically, we’re jerks to each other when we let ourselves be. Why can’t we just have a big “stop being wankers and just love” campaign? That has nothing to do with Coca-cola ™ or Hallmark ™ or Disney ™?
If I had the budget, I’d do this huge media blitz that focussed on only one thing: “Help make it better”
I know there are folks out there who probably don’t remember an ounce of kindness ever having been shown to them their whole lives, and some who haven’t ever *been* shown kindness. The children of poverty, and violence, and neglect. Children of famine, disease, and loss. Children of abundance, children of means, children of “enough”.
Everyone is someone’s child.
Everyone deserves to be loved. Everyone deserves to feel safe. Everyone deserves to feel good.
What is so *difficult* about this? What is so *difficult* about being *good* to one another? Why does it take million-dollar budgets going to advertising agencies and planned ‘days of tolerance’ blah blah blah when the budget money could go to the local soup kitchen and we could all get our heads the hell out of our own arses and realise that if we’re not part of the solution, as the saying goes, we’re part of the problem.
Because choosing to do nothing is what gets us where we are in the first place, right?
I feel like a broken record, and I’m sorry about that. But after the seventh “be aware that elder abuse is WRONG” PSA following the fourth “bullying is WRONG” PSA which accompanies the standard “discrimination in the workplace is WRONG” PSA, I’m beginning to wonder who these PSAs are aimed at. Does “the public” really not know that hurting people and/or belittling people is wrong? Really? I think the greater problem is that there are people out there who don’t *care* that hurting or belittling people is wrong.
So can we just all bloody agree that causing pain is bad? Can we all just stop being wankers to each other? Can we just smarten the hell up and remember what it’s like to feel loved, and to feel safe, and to feel good, and to try to *spread that feeling around a bit*? It’s not rocket science. Start by smiling.
i make squee noises when you tell me stuff.