Late October saw the release of a video from The Future Children Project. After an appeal to re-elect President Obama more than a dozen children between the ages of five and fifteen sing about the horrors of a Romney presidency. They are the children of the future, singing about the future, in the present. That aspect does not seem entirely well thought out and yet is the least of the problems with this piece.
The Youtube video was made private less than a week after its release garnered over a hundred thousand views and votes for ‘dislikes’ led ‘likes’ by a factor of ten. While the video is no longer available for viewing the lyrics have been preserved on other sites. The reader is cautioned not to drink a beverage while reading the lyrics in their entirety if their computer is not waterproof. A snippet is enough to understand where the song is going:
We’re the children of the future
American through and through
But something happened to our country
And we’re kinda blaming you
We haven’t killed all the polar bears
But it’s not for lack of trying
Big Bird is sacked
The Earth is cracked
And the atmosphere is frying
The young chorus also wails about a future where sick people are left to die, the air is poisoned while oil fills the sea and school spending is frozen while welfare is the only program that sees cuts. All these disasters have befallen the future and the heartless voter of the present is to blame.
A quick glance through the Republican platform reveals no provision for polar bear hunting and it’s Obama care – forgive me, the Affordable Care Act – that creates death panels to deal with those pesky sick people. Education spending has consistently risen over the years and it’s unlikely to see significant cuts. Big Bird would be just fine in the unlikely event of a reduction of Federal subsidies. Just about every portion of the song can be analyzed and rebutted as it is not based on reality.
The creators of the video also do a huge disservice to the children in the video and all the others that they are claiming to help. The singers, not to mention any other impressionable viewers, are being brainwashed with some terrifying vision of the future. Worse still, those very ‘children of the future’ are the ones that will be stuck paying the bill.
An unintentionally entertaining quality of this video is the way it brings satire to life. The video was put out by a pro-Obama group and can be considered representative of liberal or Democrat thinking. It bears a strong resemblance to a Saturday Night Live sketch first run on October 29, 1988 entitled ‘Dukakis After Dark.’ The sketch features Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis explaining that rather than use their prepurchased non-refundable network air time for a now hopeless last minute appeal to voters that they will instead throw a party. Near the end of the sketch ‘Joan Baez’ appears and performs a song for the occasion:
Unilateral disarmament, abortion on demand.
Take everybody’s guns away and toss them in the sand.
Free needles for the addicts, free condoms for the kids.
We’ll not blame the criminal for anything he did.
For who can say what’s right or wrong, is there such a thing as sin?
And does it really matter, if wars we lose or win?
See the similarity? The sketch holds up well over twenty years after its original airing. There is one difference; the writers at SNL were trying hard for satire, the Future Children Project is dead serious.