The year was 1975. Actress Sally Struthers had charmed her way into America's living rooms as Gloria Stivic Archie Bunker's daughter on the hit sitcom All In the Family, married to "meathead." But Struthers was known for something else. More prevalent than her appearances on All in the Family were her cloying pitches for the Christian Children's Fund for which she was trying to use her "Family" fame.
Finally a glib SNL-writer wannabe came out and said what many were thinking when they saw her entreating, eternally earnest face: people were more interested in paying money for Struthers to shut up than helping the hungry children. Ouch.
The same phenomenon happened a few years ago with another charity: people began to dislike Jerry Lewis more than muscular dystrophy.
Struthers' and Lewis' charities are not the only ones in which compassion turned against itself and people began to dislike the messenger, now sometimes called "virtue signalers."
No one wants to be called bad for eating what they eat--especially at mealtime and as long as there is more than one channel on peoples' devices, they will tune horrifying animal images out and keep eating what they are eating. Unless, hopefully, just as tasty food is available that is not cruel such as slaughter-free, "lab" meat which also mitigates the environmental toll of factory farms and grazing.
Those who tune out gory virtual photos can also avoid seeing the real thing; the mega industrial farms, slaughterhouses and even livestock trucks are often out of sight. Even the mountains, container loads and landfills of the millions of birds recently "euthanized" to protect profits from bird flu are out of sight. Why? Big Food companies constitute some of news outlets' major advertisers--along with Big Pharma--so the images are censored. (The same thing happened ten years ago when ten percent of US pigs died from a epidemic disease but photos of the corpses were not to be seen and few food consumers even knew.)
Still, a gory and emotional photo can make a difference. Who remembers "The Vulture and the Little Girl" a 1993 photograph by Kevin Carter of a collapsed, famine-stricken child in Sudan with a vulture ready to pounce a few feet away? It led to a huge movement for African famine relief.
Images Moved New York Times Columnist to Speak Out
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