Sesame Street Creates Cute Loveable Girl Character as Face of Child Hunger...Oscar is Pissed

NY Times - The familiar address of Sesame Street is about to get a new visitor, one who could surely benefit from the sunny days and friendly neighbors there. For a prime-time special to raise awareness about hunger faced by American families, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces “Sesame Street,” has created a new Muppet character named Lily, a 7-year-old girl representing one of the 17 million American children that the Department of Agriculture estimates are “food insecure,” meaning their access to food is limited or uncertain. “We thought long and hard about how do we really represent this from a child’s point of view?” Jeanette Betancourt, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president for outreach and educational practices, said on Monday morning in a telephone interview. “We felt it was best to have this new Muppet take this on in a positive way and a healthy way.”

Boy, this is going to stick right in Oscar's craw, just ruin his day.  He's Oscar the Freaking Grouch. He lives in a trash can on the side of the street and as far as I can tell, has been surviving on pizza crust and half eaten donut sticks for like 40 years. He's so malnourished he's turned green, he's never gotten a special on hunger.  But then a cute faced little girl comes along and all of a sudden starvation is a big deal. Like Grouches that live in trash cans don't gotta eat either.

And frankly, the Sesame Workshop writers are going about this all wrong. Sorry, but all wrong. Giving this Lily bright colors, a decent outfit and taking on the problem in a "positive and healthy way." That's not going to do anything, sure its nice for children watching the show, but children aren't funding soup kitchens and volunteering time and non-perishables. 4 and 5 year olds watching this can't do squadoosh to help the situation, and parents are just going to assume Dora the Explorer moved to Sesame Street for some reason.

You want to urge change, make it real. Make that child die from starvation on screen. Sure it'll probably scar little kids, but then parents will have to tune in, figure out what's going on, and you can be damn sure they're not going to sit idly by while kids are bawling their eyes out urging mom and dad to bring a 10-pack of Spaghetti O's down to the neighborhood food pantry.

Or you can do it your way and have the face of child hunger be some cutesy colorful muppet who I'm sure everything works out for. I guess I didn't really expect anything less when we're at the point in society where instead of calling a kid homeless or starving we said they're food or shelter "insecure." Yea they're insecure because they have none. Lets be real about this. It's a lot easier to ignore someone's problems when they're characterized as "insecure." A lot harder to ignore something when you say that 7 year old kid will be sleeping in a cardboard box with his Mom tonight and might not eat until Thursday.