Perhaps you’ve seen the ads by a group whose logo is a blended elephant and donkey, featuring children of various ages exhorting Washington politicians to get along, and address the issues that matter most. The gist of the ads is that children can’t vote, but if they could, they would vote for people who promise to do things like “protect Social Security”…

The organization putting these ads out is DividedWeFail.org, which is a branch of the AARP. You can see the ads in question here. The Social Security comment isn’t just one of many issues they’re concerned about, it’s the one issue. When the ads first started running, they didn’t state who was really behind them. Currently they end with a mention that it’s the AARP.

Now I can’t possibly be the only one who finds it completely perverse to find these ads are paid for by an organization run by and for the explicit benefit of old people to the detriment of younger generations, an organization that has been the primary impediment to any real attempt at real Social Security reform for decades. It’s absolutely twisted to see children exhorting voting age adults to “protect Social Security” when it’s those very children who will be bankrupted by it (once Generation X is bankrupted first).

Seriously, do these people have no shame?

More importantly, where is the organization of young working Americans? And why are they not making ads exhorting congress to end Social Security? Surely, in the Age of YouTube, such ads could be made cheaply and distributed for free on the Internet. What if each of us went out and found one senior citizen collecting Social Security who was willing to speak out against it, and just filmed them asking congress to stop the insanity. Would that have an effect?

Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. But at least you could be sure the effort wasn’t staged, and the feelings in the ads would be genuine.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 10:08 am and is filed under News & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.