More Desensitisation on the Way

Today on the news I saw a preview of the newest scare-your-pants-off ad campaign. This one is for the dangers of texting while driving.

Firstly... IMO anyone who texts while driving is too braindead to have a drivers licence. In fact they're too retarded to be out unsupervised. I can't believe any higher-order animal would be moronic enough to take one hand off the wheel and both eyes off the road, just to respond like Pavlov's dog to some dinging electronic gadget. But apparently the road is full of them. Put it this way, would you open a laptop and reply to an email while driving? Sounds ludicrous doesn't it, but it's exactly the same as texting. And it's enough of a problem to warrant a government scare campaign. Apparently.

But that's not the thing. The thing is, now the taxpayer has been slugged yet more millions of dollars, again, to cater for society's lowest-common-denominators. And so here follows another in a long line graphic ads, like gory car accidents, skanky smoking diseases, all the way back to that laughable AIDS ad with the bowling Grim Reaper. Here we go again.

This latest effort features three young chicks in a car (notice how it's always females, coz no one gives a sh*t about males) getting suitably creamed because the dumb blonde driver is busy texting. We're treated to grisly slo-mo shots of their empty heads being smacked around by extreme kinetic energy. Punctuated by a sad, sad image of the paramedic cradling one of the poor dead girls. Awwwwwwwwwwwww.

To those government bureaucrats who make up these ad campaigns: Would you wake up! No one cares. No one gives a sh*t. People have been hounded by these kinds of "public service" images for years now. We're sick of it. We've become desensitised to it. We just switch off. It's proven that we just switch off. These ads do nothing to dissuade the behaviour they're supposed to, and they're nothing but a waste of time and money.

Ok, you wants disturbing images? You want something to make viewers cringe? Don't stop at the girls suffering head injuries. Show the car catching fire, and the occupants screaming as they are burnt horrifically. Show one person surviving, only to live an insufferable life of terrible burns and disfiguring injuries. (BTW this did happen in Texas... a poor girl was hit by a drunk driver, and suffered most terrible burns to her face. They put her on TV.) But will they do that here? Noooooooo, that would be *too* traumatic for the little viewers, wouldn't it.

So instead we're gonna have sixty drawn-out seconds of cheap melodrama. Stuff that contains nothing the kids don't see every day on youtube, and just makes every free-thinking adult laugh. "Here we go again..." I mean, look at the gory rubbish we're subjected to in prime-time TV shows, such as Law & Order. People murdered, raped, beaten, tortured, and cut-up bodies on the slab. This kind of crap shocks no one any more.

"But JQ", you say, "we gotta have these public service ads! People haveta be warned!" You want warning? Ok then. The experts reckon that texting increases your chances of having an accident 20-fold. They said it is more dangerous than drink driving. So, you get caught texting while driving... instant loss of licence. No ifs no buts. Secure your vehicle and start walking, or call daddy to pick you up. Why should some poor bastard who had 2 schooners be hauled off like a criminal, while some baby-killing texter gets a $100 fine? You start tearing up licences on the spot, and I guarantee after one week you won't even see a mobile phone in a car.

But no. The government kill-em-with-guilt department will keep churning out scare ads, while some greedy ad agency gets richer and the taxpayer gets poorer. And some self-satisfied bureaucrat can pull his pud over his latest effort to Do Something. And we'll all have to watch the stupid crap every f**king ad break.