War On Alcohol

I've not been watching very much television of late – neither the news nor regular programming – but last night I happened to watch (tried to watch, I should say) a DVD before nodding off. After waking, I decided just to flip the TV back to local programming and watched a series of Spin City re-runs – all of them Christmas related.

Several times throughout the evening (and into early morning), a commercial caught my eye. The first time I saw it, the opening imagery of (and narration about) the September 11, 2001 attacks made me think I was in store for something entirely different. What followed in the next twenty seconds or so about knocked me off my chair, though, as the ad contrasted the approximately 3,000 deaths from September 11 to the nearly 8,000 alcoholism-related deaths a year in the United States.

Bravo!

It's about time that someone started putting the events of that day (horrible though they were) into perspective. It's about time that people stopped worrying about what someone else is going to do to us and start recognizing what it is that we're doing to ourselves.

The commercial is one of several that have been submitted to a project called Courageous Persuaders.

While its website has the rather dubious header which reads

Make a Commercial
Win Scholarship Money
Get Famous

it seems as though the project has good intentions. The project – a co-partnership between a Detroit-area judge and marketing firm ("the Detroit, Michigan office of the world's largest multinational advertising agency system") – solicits ads "targeted at middle school students to warn them about the dangers of underage drinking."

Ten winning entrants are posted at the Courageous Persuaders website, including the above-mentioned Grand Prize winner (which is entitled, "Why Haven't We Declared War?").