by Heather Wokusch

In 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered in New York City; for over half an hour she put up a desperate fight against her assailant, and 38 neighbors later reported hearing her ongoing screams for help. But no one helped - not one witness even so much as called the police. Neighbors later said that they had felt powerless and confused during the attack, and certain someone else would do something to stop it. So they had gone about their business instead, closing the windows to keep out the screams.

Kind of the way many of us are coping with the war these days. The media bombard us with anthrax paranoia, patriotic military shots, and spokespeople who BS well but provide no coherent information. Cameras flash and pundits cheer as Bush attends a baseball game, bounces off Air Force One with his dog or delivers a canned speech, but intelligent discussions of the deeper implications of bombing Afghanistan are a mainstream news rarity. Unconscionable new domestic "collateral damage" developments float by each day - tax breaks for the rich, decimation of civil liberties, potential Arctic Refuge drilling, fast track trade agreements, what have you - but the sheer speed and enormity of the societal restructuring breed confusion and apathy. So we shut our windows and thoughts, absorbing the Emmys rather than the ugly reality of war.

So the terrorist training camp known as School of the Americas continues to operate Stateside, but has changed its name to The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation to fool those pesky protesters and retain US public funding. Why stop indoctrinating terrorism when you can just rebrand? In spite of its lofty name, the International Coalition Against Terror is mainly composed of the countries manufacturing and stockpiling most of the world's weapons of mass destruction. Bush continues to sell his rollback of civil liberties as "preventing more atrocities in the hands of the evil ones." Not to be outdone, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson defended his agency's much maligned handling of the anthrax crisis with, "Something that's factual at this moment proves not to be factual in retrospect. That doesn't mean it wasn't factual at the time." Any further questions?

One of Beers' first branding projects was working with the Ad Council (formerly known as the War Advertising Council) on a series of commercials to "distill the values and virtues of American democracy." One spot, called "I am an American," features speakers of various ethnic backgrounds and invokes E PLURIBUS UNUM (Out of many, one) to show that "our diversity makes America great."

Let's propose another Ad Council spot: "I am aware." It will show ordinary citizens across the United States, indeed across the world, rising up to combat the societal rollback taking place in the name of supposedly fighting terrorism. It will invoke common sense in realizing that dropping bombs on a ravaged people and promoting mass starvation does not induce peace. It will show that diversity makes the whole world great, and that the actions of a single person from afar can sometimes mean the difference between life and death for another.

Brand that.

Heather Wokusch is a freelance writer. She can be contacted at womanrant@hotmail.com

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