Moving, effective video about kids in war

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This could work as a general “snapshots of life” comic.

I’m not sure how to feel about how the only really “moving, effecitve” element of the video is how the focal point is a white middle class girl in an english speaking country instead of a member of a race and class who is actually suffering a war at the moment.

It’s like the last line of “just because it isn’t happening here doesn’t mean it isn’t happening” has the subtext “you only care about this girl’s suffering because she’s white and english”. On one hand, it’s pretty patronizing, but on the other, yeah, the average human sucks at empathizing outside their circles of association.

It’s that scene near the end of “A Time To Kill” where the lawyer says “Now imagine she’s white.”

I’m an average human. I suck at empathizing outside my circles of association, and I wish for Save the Children to know that this ad is effective.

Because the girl is white? Not really. Because she’s English? Well, maybe. Even though I’m American, English culture is not that different from my own, so I can’t tell myself that the girl is from some Uncanny Valley where people either somehow enjoy going to war, or are doomed to keep having wars because of their hopelessly broken culture. It might even help that she’s English rather than American, because the video makes me think of World War II, in which this kind of thing really happened to English civilians.

And lastly, it focuses on one person. They’re not asking me to help end war, which is a goal that promises soul-crushing defeat, but to help the person this girl represents, which is achievable, and worth the effort.

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