Okay, this has to be the weirdest bit of weirdness I've seen since Dr. Weird Strange McWeird won the World's Weirdest Weirdo competition. Some nutty national guard outfit in Maine is giving out life-size pics of deployed servicemen out to families. The cut-outs are only from the waist-up and are called, for rather obvious reasons, "Flat Daddies" or "Flat Mommies" depending on the gender of the soldier in question. The kids are supposed to drag these images around with them, sticking them in the car for that trip to the grocery...Yeah, I told you it was freaky.
At first I thought this had to be a joke, but it's in the NY Times as well as the Boston Globe.
“The response has been unbelievable,” said Sgt. First Class Barbara Claudel, director of the Maine National Guard’s family unit. “The families just miss people so much when they’re gone that they try to bring their soldier everywhere.”
Really, it's fascinating from so many angles...But effective?
Maybe if it does work, then we can get flat daddies out to the families of all those dads who have either flown the coop or just don't have time to go their kid's soccer game. Yeah, that'd be perfect.
The story was covered on NPR
The story was covered on NPR about a month ago:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5744825
South Bronx redux
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when the South Bronx was continuously asmolder, New York City and the feds launched an effort to convince people that all those abandoned buildings did not represent potential tinder but, instead, were inhabited. Driving across the endless series of potholes that was the Cross-Bronx Expressway (a misnomer if there ever was one), you'd see ranks of empty buildings whose windows were filled with cheery folk, cheery plants, cheery kids and dogs. They were all silhouettes, Potemkin printouts unfurled over plyboarded panes.
Who needs real loved ones, real life, when you have the simulacrums?
Flat Daddies
My husband is an attorney in civilian life and an Infantry Officer in the army reserve. He sacrificed his ENTIRE LAW PRACTICE, TOOK A 5O,OOO DOLLAR A YEAR PAYCUT DURING HIS DEPLOYMENT AND RETURNED TO THE STATES TO NO INCOME!!! Our 7 year old daughter had nightmares, wet the bed, passed out in the back seat of my car while listening to the news all because her daddy was fighting in the war, a damn war he never agreed with but left with no question because he is a soldier. The only thing that got her through that was that damn FLAT DADDY!!! So before you go making dumb ass comments and assumptions, perhaps you should walk a mile in a soldiers or his families shoes!!!
Family shoes
I'm presuming, VMURDOCH, aka, Vicki, that your message is not spam. Probably lots of people posting to Kairosnews have family, friends, or former students who are deployed. I've got a nephew, two nephews of dear family friends, and a couple former students in Iraq and Afghanistan, and also have a former student who has returned to Iraq to be with his family: all have been subject to the rigors of war. Notwithstanding, flat daddies still strike me as quite odd. If your daughter was helped by a flat daddy, that's terrific. May she, and your family, thrive. But flat daddies are the product of an administration that has shown blessed little sympathy, much less empathy, for the families of soldiers who have not survived Iraq or Afghanistan, much less the soldiers who have survived with injuries; this lack of empathy/sympathy has been manifested in concrete ways, in terms of reductions in benefits, among other things. And so it seems quite fitting to criticize a program undertaken for public relations reasons. After all, 3-D daddies are generally much better than flat daddies.