by Heidi Greco
In January [of 2003], a startling little ad appeared on television stations across the United States. It opens with a young girl pulling petals off a daisy, counting each of the petals as they drop away. Behind the sound of her voice, a man’s voice merges in, and soon new images appear: rockets firing from artillery trucks, oil fields burning with dark black smoke, groups of soldiers running past fences and rolls of barbed wire. The thirty-second spot winds down to its final scene, the unthinkable cloud of a nuclear bomb exploding.
If the ad scratches the surface of some long-ago memory, it’s because this is a new take on an ad from 1964. The original ad also started with the little girl and the daisy, and ended with the vision of the mushroom cloud. Produced as part of Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against U.S. presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, the ad carried a resonance that remains effective today.
The message of the current ad is that we ‘let the
inspections work’. In other words, that we slow down and wait before allowing
our (or anyone else’s) leaders ‘lead’ us into war.
There’s a hokey but charming poem that starts off, “When I am old, I shall wear
purple…” Well, my plan is just slightly different. For one thing I’m not waiting
until I am old, I have already started my plan. And that plan isn’t to ‘wear
purple’, but rather, to wear a daisy.
The ad made me think about the daisy as a symbol for peace – as a symbol for the optimism so many of us continue to cling to, despite the current showdown these tension-filled days. Wonderfully, when I began to research the meanings of this simple flower, I discovered that it not only stands for innocence, but that the message it carries when it’s given as a gift is the promise of hope.
Ironically, an Internet search on the word ‘daisy’ turns up another, darker result. It doesn’t take long to encounter references to the horrific sounding BLU-82B Commando Vault. ‘Big Blue 82’, as it’s sometimes known, is a bomb the size of a small car, with another even more affectionate sounding pet name, the ‘Daisy Cutter’. This nickname seems to derive from the daisy pattern the bomb creates on the landscape where it falls. According to a BBC report, the size of the pattern, so flower-like from above, can be as large as several soccer fields. Once used to create instant helicopter pads in the jungles of Vietnam, the Daisy Cutter has also been used to create flower-shaped patterns among troops in Afghanistan as well as in other target-practice destinations. In the Gulf war, simply dropping pamphlets containing threats about its use apparently turned out to be enough. They didn’t even have to go to the trouble of packing any of these 7 tonne beauties into the back of the Hercules (the only aircraft big enough to deliver these darlings – they actually have to be pushed out the back of the plane to be launched).
In some respects, the current tv ad hearkens back to the sixties – the era when flower power was just beginning to sprout. Again there’s the image of that lovely field of daisies, fresh-looking and bright, the sound of birds chittering in the background. There’s the picture of the little girl pulling petals off a daisy, the little girl who got so many people wondering what the hell was going on, the little girl who got them to start thinking.
Thinking.
That is all that any awareness campaign wants to do. It doesn’t presume to have all the answers or to claim that any one side is either completely correct or totally wrong. The only real goal of an awareness campaign is to get people doing the thing they were truly designed for, the one thing that sets us apart from all the other creatures on earth: thinking.
And so I say, the daisy. That’s what I will wear. And if people ask me why I am wearing a daisy in the dark of February, I will tell them that it is because I’ve chosen peace.
I will tell them I’ve decided I want to live in a world that’s ruled by fair and considerate actions. That I want a world where children’s lives are valued more than the ideologies of the leaders who happen to be in charge of the country where those children may live. That I want a world where there isn’t an atmosphere of manufactured fear. That I want a world that’s free of trumped-up hatreds, free of lies in the name of somebody else’s patriotism. I want a world that’s free of secret missions, hell-bent on death in the guise of preserving freedom, especially when I know that freedom is just another word for oil.
Daisy, etymologically rooted in “day’s-eye”, a term which I like to think of as “God’s eye”. An honest, unblinking eye that bears witness to our actions. Watching to see that this time we finally get it right. Because this time, for the sake of generations to come, truly we must get it right.
