Introducing…Altered Ads*

          Advertisements are often a reflection of the values held by wide cross-sections of a society.  Ubiquitous, they serve to impose ideas and persuade the way one thinks.  The desired effect is usually to influence your perspective about a product or service.  Yet it is often what we don’t see that is most important.  While advertisements for frivolous and decadent products and services are flourishing (especially in America), problems in the natural world and across humanity are neglected and go largely unnoticed.    

             In San Francisco, there is a giant advertisement for the game FarmVille 2: Country Escape.  (First of all, if you’re a grown man earning a living by working to develop and sell this stupid fucking game, then you need to do some real soul-searching, and if this leads to you leaping off of the Golden Gate Bridge, we will try to understand and probably will not blame you.)  In a world where over 850 million people go to bed hungry each night, and where 16,000 children under the age of five die from preventable causes everyday, many people (mostly in wealthy countries) sit around playing FarmVille, or some variation of it.   This is not right.  Healthy people in relatively stable and robust economies should be striving to draw attention to the plight of those who are starving across the globe, not promoting FarmVille.  There is a rift in the psychological and moral well-being of those who care more about video games than in the welfare of their fellow men.  So, having said that, above is the old ad, and below is a revised rendition.

 

          The photograph pasted into the altered ad was taken by Kevin Cater in 1993.  It is of a girl attempting to reach a feeding-center in Sudan.  Three months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for the photograph, Cater committed suicide.  His suicide note read:

I'm really, really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist... depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners…

Rest in peace.

*Divided Core has set out on a silly and offensive campaign called Altered Ads, which will attempt to offer a different side of the reality presented by certain advertisements.  Feel free to join with us or start your own campaign.