Forgive me folks, but as my gray hair increases year-to-year, my understanding of society seems to be slipping away. While good ethics remain as do good choices and positive consequences, our society goes out of its way to produce every increasing and dumber ethical blunders.
Once upon a time, Halloween was for kids. Your mom would give you a ratty old sheet, you’d poke holes in it and become a ghost or you would dress as a cowboy or a clown or a horse or a hobo. Then we got more sophisticated and kids costumes and adult costume party clothes became for fun. I was OK with that too.
However somewhere along the line, it seems that kids and even the feelings of kids were pushed aside so that the adults could co-opt Halloween and elevate it to places it should never have gone.
Don’t believe me? Well, according to the National Retail Federation, Americans will spend $2.8 billion on Halloween-costumes this year, with half of that amount being spent on grown-up costumes.
Fat Girls by Wal-Mart
As if young girls and young woman don’t have enough problems with body image, ever trying to emulate standards that are impossible for any human being to attain, Wal-Mart came out with a line of costumes called Fat Girl Costumes.
As I sit at my trusty old desk and write this, I wonder who in their sophisticated, corporate offices could think of such an idea. One thing we know, a kid didn’t think up the name, it was an adult.
I am also going to make another wild assumption: it was NOT just one adult who made this decision; it was a meeting, a series of meetings, a series of approvals and discussions and roll-out sessions. Did not one of these people have a daughter, granddaughter, niece or friend with children?
Let me put it another way: if you had a daughter who was self-conscious about her weight, would you go out of your way to say, “Hi honey, because you’re fat, I thought I would get you a Fat Girl costume this year!” I thought not.
However, as dumb as this one might have been, it pales in comparison to the “Sexy Ebola Nurse.”
You heard me correctly
The world is locked in a battle to prevent the deadly spread of the Ebola virus. The disease has already claimed the lives of thousands of people. It is extremely dangerous and the infection sometimes even finds ways to sneak through the protective clothing. No one who is on the front line of fighting this disease is joking about it. At the time of this writing, our government has sent troops into Africa to help physicians and nurses on the front line of controlling the disease.
But for the most part, “It’s still over there.” Maybe that’s the problem with this kind of arrogance and meanness, because only a bunch of fools could come out with this idea.
A company (no, I will not give them any more publicity) has introduces a “Sexy Ebola Nurse” Halloween costume. It is an isolation suit strategically open to expose a lot of skin and to not only further sexualize the holiday but also to make light of a very deadly disease.
A child did not design this costume and a child is not selling it, but a company of “adults” who could-not-care about good taste. A child would not even think of such an outfit.
Here is the point in the blog where a few of you might say, “Lighten up, Chuck!”
All right then, suppose we ask the company to make a “Metastatic Breast Cancer Costume” (use your imagination) or Maybe an Autism Costume or how about a “Pediatric Leukemia Costume?” Would those then be OK for you?
There must be, somewhere, an ethical filter put into place. I might be accused of being naïve; ethics do not often interfere with some companies trying to make a quick buck. We as customers do have a choice though. We can vote with our money and we can vote with our hearts. We might also vote to let kids reclaim their holiday.
And we can pray Ebola does not reach our shores in the way that it could.
