Armed with gray hair and walkers, the very gregarious group of grannies gathered at the Army Recruitment booth in the heart of Times Square for the purpose of enlisting. Talk about the perfect photo-op. But what made it more meaningful, from a PR perspective, was the simple resonance of their message:
“We wanted to sign up. Instead of our kids dying, we wanted to take their place. We’ve already lived our lives,” said granny of five Joan Wile, 74.
It makes Louis Farrakhan’s rhetoric and Cindy Sheehan’s increasingly ineffective advocacy pale in comparison.
To break through the cacaphony of today’s media noise, it doesn’t take thousands at yet another rally in DC, but a cogent stand by an unconventional, but earnest advocate in a setting that enhances the message — something like Cindy Sheehan’s first days in Crawford. The anarchists who descended upon Seattle for the WTO and New York for the Republican Convention can take a page out of the grandmas’ playbook. The 18 grandmas were arrested.