Defense Contractors Sponsor Sesame Street Programming Special

Defense Contractors Sponsor Sesame Street Programming Special

If you fill out and send in this form, you can remove you or your ward’s name from a list of prospective American military recruits. Its completion moves a name into a “suppression file” in the Department of Defense’s Joint Advertising and Marketing Research & Studies. This makes it much harder for military recruiters to reach out to a prospective recruit whose contact information they may have acquired in various ways. Federal law actually requires that they have as much access to high school students as any other prospective employer.

Sesame Street has become loved and reviled for its socially-conscious programming; in one famous example from 1983, after an actor on the show died, Sesame Street took the chance to impart to very young children the temporal nature of human existence by marking his character’s death on the show. The forward-thinking episode invited some degree of opposition because even adults When Families Grievethemselves continue to find death very uncomfortable or even impossible to psychologically confront.

Premiering tonight on PBS at 8 p.m. EDT is a program, “When Families Grieve,” that features four families, two of which features fathers from the American military. (One of the soldiers killed himself. The other died in a helicopter crash in Iraq.) It’s important to note that the publicly-subsidized program has made a point of representing the suffering of military-serving families under the umbrella of a discussion of, as a whole, grief, a topic universal to the human experience. The program — sponsored by defense contractors BAE Systems, the Lockheed Martin Corporation, Oshkosh Defense — explores the concept of loss from a entirely nationalistic perspective.
[link to waronyou.com]