I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought or processed…” Llyod Dobler

Today I realized just how far I am out of my element. Watching news of the now infamous Boston – Cartoon Network "Bomb scare", my one and only comment to my battle buddies is… Damn what an insanely successful street-level guerilla marketing promotion. I wish I had thought of it. But amazingly in the land of Hooah, I get labeled everything from a money hungry corporate marketing hack to an indecently shallow plastic promoter with no sense of concern for people. "Peoples lives were at risk…"

What?!? From a plastic toy – A Lite-Brite?!? We used to play with these things in grade school…

As I saw the early events unfold on TV and heard, what turned out to be less than accurate, descriptions of the "dangerous" devices I thought, "Oh boy… here we go again." When I actually saw the first glimpses of the comical (literally) Lite-Brite I immediately knew someone had blown this thing WAY out of proportion. I knew for a fact there was nothing sinister at hand. It was a marketing campaign of the best kind. Someone beat a drum and the media amplified it to indescribable proportions. (Warning: soapbox) What concerns me more is our obsession with nurturing a culture of fear. Everything (and I mean everything) has become a threat. This same level of paranoia burned down the Reichstag in 1933 and more recently had us chasing a boogie man called WMDs. $700 billion dollars later and what do we have to show for it. If we continue down this path and place all responsibility on governments to protect us from the world then we have already lost our war on extremism. More disconcerting is our loss of what makes Americans so special… spirit, courage, personal responsibility and most definitely common sense; What happened to the idea of fearing nothing but fear itself? (Steps off soap box)

On the bright side a 2 million dollar investment nets an estimated half a billion dollars of worth of advertising for a Time Warner subsidiary. Yay for corporate hacks - Let’s contract these guys for Iraq.