So You Still Wanna Talk About Guns?

The country went a little bit crazy after the Newtown massacre last December. Everyone focused on the issue of gun control as the answer to the nation’s violence problem and everyone, myself included, came down on one side or the other and voiced opinions. I read a lot of opinions and found this one the best and then I stepped away. The debates, the arguments, the rants, were too loud and the subject became too negative. Self-preservation was more important, so I did what anyone who wants to avoid violence – and talking about violence – might do and started watching The Sopranos through Netflix.

For better or worse we seem to have put Sandy Hook behind us, but the gun control argument continues to rage. I’m not happy about it because I think it’s more politically motivated than anything else, but to quote Tony Soprano: “What are you gonna do?” It’s here and it’s always going to be here. I keep on ignoring everything as best I can and for the most part I’m doing well, “but just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

The “they” are Oreo cookies of all things. Oreo sandwich cookies and their silly commercial with the two guys arguing about what part of the Oreo is the best part. If you haven’t seen it, Guy #1 likes the cream. Guy #2 likes the cookie. They argue. Guy #1 slams his book. Guy #2 upends the table. Female #1 smashes Guy #2 over the head with a chair while Guy #3 topples library shelves like dominoes. A computer monitor gets thrown and a lamp gets smashed and Guys #4 and #5 crash through a banister and fall to the main floor. Soon the library is on fire and while fire fighters hose down the inside of the library, the police show up by driving, in perfect Three Stooges fashion, through an outside wall. The joke of course, is that everyone involved in the melee, from Guy #1 to the police officer with his megaphone, is whispering because, after all, they’re in a library.

Forget the fact that Nabisco thinks it’s a funny thing to trash a library, that’s a blog post for someone else to write, what bothers me so much about the commercial is the message from Nabisco that we should solve our differences through violence and that violence is funny. So you like the cookie instead of the cream? Then you deserve a chair to the head you no good SOB. We suffer continued national tragedies and we Monday morning quarterback reasons for gun violence and we look at video games and movies and television shows and we come up with no feasible answers and now we have to look at our television commercials as well? Is there no common sense anywhere that tells us to step back a little?

“I gotta watch TV to figure out the world?” – Paul “Pauley Walnuts” Gualtieri.

There is no hope.

Don’t worry. Be sad.

For the record, I liked Sunshine’s Hydrox cookies better than Oreos and I still miss them. And as far as the cream or the cookie issue, I like peanut butter/chocolate chip cookies.