The Lung Cancer Alliance isn’t pulling any punches, with sensational and attention-grabbing posters tied to a website titled NoOneDeservesToDie.org. The posters, with sayings like, “Hipsters Deserve to Die” and “Cat Lovers Deserve to Die,” are part of a provocative campaign that is showing up all across the country. But is this vapid sensationalism, or another home-run in the same vein of the graphic novels about preparedness through a zombie apocalypse?
Why can’t it be both?
For years now, the CDC has sought out fun new ways of teaching the importance of health and safety for the public. “Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic” is basically a comic book about what to do if a
contagious disease begins spreading around the world. The use of the living dead is just a way to make the average person want to learn about something that’s important in our ever-shrinking global community.
The ‘Deserve to Die’ campaign is using the same strategy.
The LCA is going so far as to not even tip its hat, and as of now, there are posters with very little information on them; hoping only to grab the attention of passers-by. The general idea is that a disease which, according to their website, accounts for over 160,000 lives lost is not something that anyone deserves. The major speculation within the facts is that they are talking about
lung cancer, one of the rare diseases that some think is brought on through bad habits and defiance.
Apparently, the Lung Cancer Alliance wants that notion dispelled… no matter who they offend in the process.
Cat Lovers, tattooed people, crazy aunts and smug older men are all fodder for the cause. And with nothing more than a countdown on their website, people can’t even be sated of their curiosity until the campaign was to officially drops . . . supposedly Thursday at midnight, EST. However, it seemed that perhaps too much backlash caused them to let the cat out of the bag early, revealing that lung cancer was indeed their target as early as Wednesday afternoon.
Regardless, what the LCA is doing is groundbreaking and ingenious. By getting news outlets like our own to pick up a story that hadn’t even broken, they’re gaining attention for a cause without even spelling out what it is.
This out-of-the-box thinking, from zombies to who ‘Deserves to Die,’ is a step in the right direction from two groups that are not only accepting that times have changed, but also embracing the idea with such vigor that you can’t help but stare. Maybe black and white PSA’s worked in the 60’s, but with a society that is only shocked when it’s caught off guard and a youth that plays video games set in real life war zones, the only way to cause a splash is to cannon ball into the deep end.
The CDC gets it. Now, the LCA does as well. And they’re just a few of the government agencies that do.
The Lung Cancer Alliance is proving that maybe the only thing that really deserves to die, is the outdated way in which other policy-makers bring attention to these problems.
