#AmericaIsBeautiful
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| Photo credit: Coca-Cola |
My first reaction was shock, then horror with exclamations of such profound racism, but that quickly turned to wonder as I zoomed in on the last names of the tweeters themselves. A few, in no particular order: Wunderlin, Moyer, Staehle, Kline and Lepley. Hello Germans, Austrians, Swedes, Scots and a whole boot full of other ancestral lines.
A guy named Anthony Lifrieri wrote: “coca cola this is america. To quote an American patriot: we speak English in this country.” O.K., but certainly your Italian ancestors didn't.
In the event you somehow missed all the
fuss: the controversial spot features bilinguals singing “America the
Beautiful” in seven different languages - English,
Spanish, Keres, Tagalog, Hindi, Senegalese French and Hebrew - while the screen
pans various U.S. landscapes with multicultural families in everyday scenes,
capped with the hashtag #AmericaIsBeautiful.
Coke was speared, called every name in the
book, including commie and terrorist-supporting while there were numerous
threats to boycott, paired with bad Photoshop pics: a Bald Eagle clutching a
Pepsi, superimposed over the American flag; another shows contents of the
iconic red can being poured down a toilet.
Defiantly, Coke went further, releasing an
extended, behind-the-scenes version of the spot, spelling out “America is
Beautiful. And gets more beautiful every day,” with interviews of
culturally mixed Americans around the country who touch on both the happiness
and pride they experience as citizens, as well as prejudice they have
encountered.
I'll admit it, this one got me.
We have faced discrimination in our
household, as have many of our friends from other countries. It's not always
overt, but obvious all the same. It’s not even worth getting into, but does it
upset me? Yes. Luis is able to diffuse a look, a comment, an indecent reaction
faster than I can.
On the upside, I think positive voices
outweigh the negative ones.
There's no way to poll in any exact way, but to date, the original commercial has been viewed by close to 11 million on YouTube, with over 44,000 likes, compared to 10,000-plus dislikes.
I will stay out of the fight and leave it to Coke and its powerhouse genius
strokes, such as this: all of the foreign-language singers in the ad are
Americans. Very sweet, very cute ones at that, making the xenophobes look like
big, ugly bullies.
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