• Today is pretty [???]

I’m not the first one to cry foul about the Honda ad that plays over and over on Hulu. Dressed in a lavender shirt, sporting a black vest and fedora, faded jeans, and cowboy boots, a blues singer (Ty Taylor of Vintage Trouble) leans against a splintery porch column and croons, “Today…”

A guitar strums rhythmically as the scene quick-cuts: a newscaster’s head talking, some static, a bronze sign that says “Bankruptcy,” heavy machinery pushing around a mountain of trash. For a fraction of a second, we flash back to our singer, his face (but not his chin and neck) awash in weird light that bleaches his deep brown skin to the same pale purple as his shirt. All of our woes summed up in eight beats: “Today bum bum the world is pretty sad.”

Immediate contradiction follows. Some fancy finger-work on the guitar, and a shiny black car rolls out of the sunrise and down a desert road. Suddenly we’re in the passenger seat, looking up as if from a child’s height at a twenty-something brunette who assures us serenely–maybe even a little smugly–that there are “great things too.” Then a series of quirky but fresh-faced young people, in the middle of doing quirky fun things: wearing superhero costumes, cleaning up a beach, leaning out of a car window streaming a beard long and thick enough to be a sea otter. Today, today, today, is actually, actually, actually (all together now) pretty great!

We’re landing on Mars! Driving fast cars! Even Dr. Seuss would be proud.

The first thing that rankled people about this ad was that its original version featured footage of people protesting outside a Detroit courthouse in defense of their pensions. Aaron Foley, for instance, writing in the blog Detroit Jalopnik pointed out the ugliness of the ad’s implications: it’s OK if old folks eat cat food, as long as the young and strong drive happy. And who needs Detroit as long as we have the import market and the open road?

Eventually Honda cut the protest footage, but the whole thing still makes me want to take a shower in the hopes of washing all the quirky fun out of my life–except that this would be self-indulgent, too, given the drought. Not that I’m against self-indulgence! Not that this blog post isn’t fueled by a giant latte and funded by a tutoring business that involves a lot of driving and leaves significant carbon footprint. For me personally, sitting across a cafe table from the loving, brilliant man that I married, enjoying access to the internet, not to mention a clean water supply and better than adequate food, today offers zero margin for complaint. Nevertheless I am afflicted, because other people are afflicted.

I fiercely believe in self-care, in the human need for optimism and celebration. Maybe that’s why this ad gets under my skin: it exploits human tendencies that resonate in me. We really do need to avoid burying ourselves under bad news. About issues like police brutality, school funding cuts, and unfair labor practices I get so worked up that I enforce a 9 pm ban on conversations with even a whiff of politics. What’s wrong with Honda spreading a little cheer? The problem is that this ad encourages us to shelter in our feel-good zone, to “give back” by spending a day at the beach, and to express our freedom through grooming and wardrobe choices. Forget that freedom of speech and the right to privacy are genuinely threatened. Forget the cycles of poverty, repression, and lack of education. Focus on volunteer work you can complete holding a clipboard on a sunny afternoon. Go home feeling all rosy and fulfilled.

Again, I’ve got nothing against rosy. There’s nothing wrong with clean beaches. Nothing wrong with feeling satisfied, or even joyous, after a good day’s work. All the same, in our thoughts and especially in our actions, we the privileged (and anyone who can view that ad is to some degree privileged) need to open ourselves to fear, grief, anger, disgust. There’s a good reason why young adult fiction these days teems with dystopian societies marked by a wealthy and powerful elite lording it over impoverished masses. In our hearts, we know that we are be heading in that direction. The rich have been getting richer and the poor getting poorer for longer than our teenagers have been alive. It is critical to our society and to our planet that we show our young people something else.

We need to live by the principles that justice and equality are both possible and necessary. Even if we don’t believe it, we need to behave as though we do. That’s our only occasion for optimism–in fact, our only excuse for breathing. It’s a belief that calls for the full range of human emotions, today and every day.