If you don’t read this column....

Back when I was spending my junior year of high school in Sweden there was a series of ads for self-adhesive bandages — they might have been Band-Aids, they might have been some Scandinavian equivalent that users had to assemble themselves with an allen wrench; I can't be sure — that featured adorable young children about to suffer some kind of misfortune.
One adorable moppet, no doubt blonde-haired and blue-eyed as adorable Swedish children tend to be, was about to step barefoot onto a piece of broken glass. Another was on the verge of scraping himself on a nail or some other such sharp, menacing object.
The tagline on these ads, roughly translated, was, "Accidents happen so easily."
I always found them immensely disturbing. Why, I wondered, do the advertising efforts of Sweden's bandage industry sound so much like they were written by a low-level mobster running a protection racket.
"That's a real nice kid you got there," these Nordic bandage thugs seemed to be telling potential customers. "Be a shame if something happened to him."
Is the Scandinavian Mob (The Møb?) really so heavily invested in the home healthcare industry?
That could be, I suppose. But I'm starting to suspect there's more to it than a cunning crime syndicate that wants to both break your thumbs and sell you splints to set them with. I realize now that vaguely threatening advertisements involving children are far more common than I realized.
Take my trip out West earlier this year. I mentioned this a few months ago, but it seems worth bringing up again, if only because it was seriously creepy. Somewhere in Montana there was a billboard that featured a stark, black-and-white picture of a young boy aiming a firearm at the camera. "If he doesn't believe in God," the tagline read, "will he believe in you?"
In other words, take your kid to church or he'll shoot you in the face.
Then there's the ad I saw Wednesday night. The one that brought this all back to mind. It features a woman getting ready for what appears to be a night on the town. Her daughter, presumably about to be left behind with a babysitter while Mom and Dad whoop it up, is playing dress-up along with Mommy. They're laughing. They appear to be having the kind of happy mother-daughter moment they’ll both treasure in their later years. But then Mom does something terrible. She puts some lipstick on, then turns to apply a little to her daughter's lips. Meanwhile, an ominous-sounding voice-over warns us that if we adults fail to get our flu shots, "You're not just fluin' yourself."
Awful puns aside, I'm not convinced this is really the best way to push flu immunization. I'm not sure a message like, "Get immunized or BIRD FLU WILL KILL YOUR CHILDREN!" really makes me want to rush out to the clinic. Mostly it makes me want to lock myself in my bedroom and not come out until spring.
I’d do it, too. But I'm afraid there's something sharp in there. And accidents happen so easily.


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