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Now, normally I don't really worry about the environment. I'd just like to start off by saying that although I recognize that global warming is a terrible issue, and I really think there is more everyone could be doing to help out, the environment in the places where I hang out tends to always be the same... Sunny, warm, clean, pixellated, with a 50% chance of armageddon.
Last night I saw something that really got me thinking, however. My wife and I watched a little bit of the big Hollywood special, "Earth to America". The event featured dozens of high profile celebrities performing skits about the environment, health, and of course plenty of delightful Bush bashing. We watched for a while as they explained the evils of our reliance on fossil fuels, lowering greenhouse emissions, and fun stuff like MSG in our foods. Mostly it was a fairly dull affair, except for Steve Martin playing the banjo and Eric Idle doing a live performance with Tom Hanks and Steve Martin of the Meaning of Life song.
We were just about to shut it off when it suddenly got so funny I could barely tear my eyes away from it. It wasn't really laugh-out-loud funny, it was mostly a sort of funny on par with finding out that your local minister has been snorting cocaine off stripper's tits every Saturday night and then stumbling in to give his sermons still ramped up to the eyeballs on crystal meth.
You see, at the first commercial break I was urged to purchase not one, not two, but THREE sport utility vehicles and two different types of artery clogging fast foods. The commercial break ended and the comedians came back on and explained that the earth was in dire danger, the Kyoto accord may be our only hope for survival, and of course several Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes jokes also ensued. The next commercial break was more of the same. Bright red gas guzzling sports cars... Thin, attractive, athletic people consuming trple burgers with bacon and cheese.
Now, as I said, I'm not an activist by any stretch of the imagination. But this just bugged me. If you are going to go to all the trouble to put together a show about saving the planet, shouldn't you be trying to avoid selling more of this crap? To me this is roughly the equivalent of them having commercials for heroin during that new show Intervention, or ads for the local Dinosaur Exhibit during your creationist Christian broadcast. I'm not saying that any of these things is wrong or right, it's just not a great idea to advertise for items that represent the very thing you are trying to stamp out.
Well, that's my two cents worth. I'll let you get back to playing some games, but first, why don't you head over to Jack Thompson's web site and take every word to heart. I strongly encourage you to do your best to have not just violent video games banned, but every single one of those filthy games removed from shop shelves before the Christmas rush allows them to corrupt our planet.
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