Living-Deliberately.com

I was recently in Knoxville and saw this sign in a few places. This particular billboard is in the center of the city, not far from Magpies‘, where I get truly fantastic mini-cupcakes (which, btw, to those of you following my cupcake baking exploits, have completely spoiled my desire to make them at home. Peg’s are just toooo good!).

But anyway, my friend and fellow cupcake-conspirator were in the city getting our afternoon fix of mini Red Velvets when he pointed out this sign to me and my stomach did an involuntary turn from happy bliss to utter revolt-ion.

ARE THEY SERIOUS???? This sign is so tremendously offensive on so many levels. My first thought was how it actually came to be. I mean, step-by-step, this revolting concept had to hit a lot of desks before I saw it in the city. No doubt many minds considered this particular Ripley’s gimmick, graphic design, presentation, from the exhibit designer right on down to the guy who put the sign paper up.  DID NOBODY CHECK THEIR SENSITIVITY CHIP???

Who’s grand idea was it to include a premature infant in this picture? Does anyone really believe that there are actual incubated human babies in the Ripley’s Museum? And next, who (and praytell was it the same creep as the first “genius”) decided it would be a good, rational design choice to juxtapose it with a LIZARD? What parallel are they drawing, and thus wanting us to also draw?

Ripley’s makes it’s money on the “freakish” element of it’s exhibits. I get that. So…are they saying that an incubated baby is a freak? A side show?

Added to the “What the Bleep Were They Thinking?” element is the fact that this sign is only a few miles from a Children’s Hospital. Parents needing to go through town will see it. Parents with little tiny lives they love dearly in those very incubators.

It’s disgusting. Ripley’s is the kind of place I may have taken my “gross-out” loving kiddos. But those same kiddos had a sister who spent her life in a Children’s Hospital. Another one of them has been in and out frequently. I want to raise children who are AWARE of and COMPASSIONATE to the quiet, often invisible, dramas going on behind those hospital walls, being saved by the kind of science Ripley’s is poking fun at.

Because if their intention was to display the “marvels” of medical science and what it can do, they certainly didn’t communicate it with this billboard. Equating infants with reptiles and presenting it all as something to be gawked at is repulsive. Which, is what I am: Repulsed right out of ever going there.

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