Going Green

An ad writer reflects on where he's ended up in the cooperate machine. Yet another project for my Creative Writing class :)

Going Green

J. Scarlett

 

 

 

“Meet the #1 Mainstream Green Laundry Detergent In America” it said, in big, green letters. The Arm and Hammer “Essentials” bottle seemed to stare into my soul like God embodied in a laundry detergent. Glaring back at that big avocado colored bottle I finished off my ad with an asterisk – what ad isn’t complete without an asterisk? There’s always something in the fine print. I had to stop myself from adding what should have come after the coinciding bottom star: “We don’t really give a caribou’s a*s in Alaska about the planet, but going green is hip! So here’s your overpriced pop culture. May cause irritation, rash, blindness…”

I allowed myself a sardonic grin, but held back my itching fingers. A sign of the state I was in, that I didn’t print that up and bring it to the cooperate heads of America. A younger me would have done so every Saturday afternoon with a posse of bell-bottomed picketers behind me. What a giant joke the advertising world is. A “green” laundry detergent – packaged in super-thick plastic covered in adhesive. Yeah, real green. And here I was, living off the money those poor wannabe-earth-savers spent on this false advertising crap; the soccer moms, trying to save us all from global warming by washing their kids’ shorts with “Essentials”.

The sad thing is, there’s not much of another option. You can buy the laundry detergent in the big plastic bottle that says it’s green, or you can buy the laundry detergent in the big plastic bottle that doesn’t. There isn’t a farmer’s market for household supplies. And really, it’s the supplies that are in charge. I live off of the profit of the company making green detergent that pays for me to make them catchy advertisements, so that I can turn around and use it to buy detergent. It’s a sick ring-around-the-rosy sort of system.

What was that quote I was always telling my friends? “Who is to be more pitied? The writer who is bound and jailed by police? Or the writer living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?” Well look who’s being pitied now. Just another cog in this giant cooperate machine. Every once in a while I’ll start making irritating noises, then someone will come along and douse me in some oil and tighten me back into place, and what will I do? I’ll just keep spinning along, because I’ve gotten so dizzy that if I stop now I know I’ll fall flat on my face and leave the rest of the world swirling around me. A younger me would have loved to be left standing still…

But there’s laundry to do.

I finish off my ad with what I’ve been paid to say. “The clean you want at price you can afford. Now every day is Earth Day.”