Are you trucking serious? This protest is rubbish
IF the group protesting Coca-Cola’s Christmas trucks for threatening “vulnerable communities” were truly serious, they’d ban Christmas entirely, writes James Morrow.
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IN the Australia of almost 2018, where all our other problems have been solved, our roads are wide and clear, our hospitals overflowing with spare beds, and our schools turning out students who can beat any brainiac from Singapore to Stockholm, it’s no wonder that some people have time to be annoyed about a truck.
Or, to be more specific, a Coca-Cola truck all decked out for Christmas with a great big jolly Santa painted on the side.
To the horror of a group calling itself “Parents’ Voice”, the holiday Coke truck is doing a tour of NSW and Queensland, holding a number of charity events for the Salvos along the way, and will wind up its trip at Sydney’s Carols in the Domain.
Having garnered a little over 700 signatures at time of publishing, Parents’ Voice says this is no festive fundraiser but rather “a giant mobile billboard marketing unhealthy products to vulnerable communities”.
And a merry Christmas to you, too, Parents’ Voice.
It is of course tempting to dismiss this sort of thing out of hand. Though as an example of the combination of anti-capitalism and condescension that typically informs the busybody mindset it’s pretty hard to beat.
Because of course, “billboards” and “marketing” are nothing more than evil money-making, mind-control devices and techniques
And “vulnerable communities” is a not-so-secret code for “people who need people like us to do their thinking for them”.
It is also easy to mock this sort of killjoy behaviour or hit back with all the usual lines about personal choice and parental responsibility. (Though it is also probably fair to ask whether the conveners of the group have personally pledged to bake dietetic Christmas cookies this year and serve only the lowest fat, most non-alcoholic eggnog.)
But that sort of argument is small thinking that fails to take the arguments of Parents’ Voice seriously. If anything, this mob is missing the forest for the Christmas trees.
Think about it: If running a soft-drink truck through towns where there is a high proportion of overweight kids is a problem, why on Earth are these communities allowed to celebrate Christmas at all when the pop culture version of the holiday centres around the myth of a big fat man loading everyone up with consumer goods?
And if marketing and billboards are a problem because, as the petition states, “one in four Australian kids (are) overweight or obese”, what about the $56 billion in credit-card debt Australians are expected to rack up over November and December?
Given that no small part of that spend is likely to occur in “vulnerable communities” in response to “pester power” (the catch-all cover used by parents who find it too hard to say no to their kids), why not ban all Christmas-themed advertising?
Really, it just smacks of too much excess and fun when we should be teaching our kids to exercise, eat right, and contribute productively to the GDP.
If they were really serious, the protesters would direct their ire not at Coca-Cola but at the entire edifice of Christmas itself.
It’s sometimes said that people who get exercised about things like this are just a new incarnation of the Puritans, whose doctrines writer HL Mencken once satirised as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.
Though in their defence, the Puritans who sailed for America are said to have only pulled in at Plymouth Rock because they had run out of beer.
But, as it turns out, this is more accurate than most breezy historical comparisons. Back in Puritan times, Christmas was barely marked at all as they thought it all too pagan and fun.
Sadly, records are a bit fuzzier when it comes to the obesity rates in 17th-century New England. But making the kids bring in the harvest probably burned a few more calories than playing X-Box.
Originally published as Are you trucking serious? This protest is rubbish
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