Baby Pictures

No, don’t panic, I’m not going to regale you with adorable pictures of my sons when they were babies.  I”m saving those for when they bring home prospective mates.  In any case, my sons were born just as the digital age was dawning, the internet was not yet readily accessible  and blogging was still a thing of the future, but if I had had access to these wonderful tools back then, I surely would have focused my blogging on motherhood and children.  And while I don’t do that now, over the last few days I’ve stumbled upon a number of items regarding corporate exploitation of children that are bad enough by themselves, but when you add them together, they do not make a pretty picture.

First, from Gulf Coast Fund we have this picture of a toddler playing on a beach along the Gulf of Mexico even as crews are cleaning up oil.  While attention is only now turning to the human health impact of the spill (and I have a lengthy piece on this that will be out soon), there are a number of toxins in both the oil and dispersants and people, let alone the smallest and most vulnerable of people should not be anywhere near a beach that is contaminated enough to need a clean-up crew.

Then there is this hideous billboard advertising USI Wireless via Robin Marty on RH Reality  Check.

And why you ask were they suggesting that smoking babies were fast and cheap?  Well because people objected to their first idea that women were fast and cheap and their second idea that men were fast and cheap.  Read Robin’s piece.

But really babies aren’t fast and cheap, they are actually lucrative consumer markets, that what you are selling is unhealthy and may lead to a lifetime of bad habits should never stand in the way of making a buck:

And last but not least, in the this totally stinks department– sexualizing baby images is not okay, in fact it is maybe possibly a mere baby step up from child porn.

The corporate exploitation of children damages us all.  Imagine instead that we regarded children as the precious beings that they are and made their education and  health a top priority instead of endangering them and trying to make a profit off of them.  That would make a far prettier picture.