Donate Life — The World’s Biggest Asshole
“Donate Life” is a non-profit organization which was founded in 1992 and its mission is to encourage more people to become donors of organs, tissue and eyes for those who are in need. Unfortunately, the past few years this action had been reduced and as a result many people, adults and children have died waiting for the compatible organs that never came.
Every person can donate and receive a donation regardless of their age, sex, religion or social status. The point in this act is to show to our fellow men that they are not alone and that there is always hope when the sense of compassion dominates. This point of view has been proven right as during the years of “Donate Life’s” function, almost 138 millions of tissue, eyes and organs have been donated in the U.S,which is equal to the 56% of the population, doing credit to its efforts of shaking people into helping others in any way possible. Its earnings come from contributions made by the people, its partners, the supporters of the educational programmes it organizes, the products and services they offer to the donation community and last by fees that come from event registration.
“Donate Life” decided to take a risk and create a campaign, specifically a 2-minute film with the title “The world’s biggest asshole” in order to raise awareness for organ donation. This film shows a man called Coleman Sweeney who behaves utterly disrespectful towards everyone. For instance, he urines in beer bottles and then toss them away, steals underwear from women in the laundromat, even the kids’ candies on Halloween. Not only that, but also shoots a neighbor’s dog with a paint gun just for entertaining himself. In the end, during an argument with a waitress over the price of his meal, wanting her to make a discount, he suddenly passed away. But that’s not the plot twist of the story. The unexpected fact in this film is that Coley Sweeney turned out to be an organ donor as it was discovered by the waitress when she saw his card member in his wallet, and the jerk went automatically from zero to hero as even this man can save a life.
Despite their doubts, the campaign had a huge success since the registrations increased from 149 to 1,022 per day! As we can see, the film shows many inappropriate behaviours, but one of the main problems was to whether use the word “asshole’’ or not and try other words, such as jerk or a-hole, but none of them delivered the message as they wanted something strong. The moral of this short story is that no matter how bad of a person anyone can be, there’s always a bright side in them, even if it’s not visible.
Our team: Dimitra Karali Mariza Rizou Evaggelia Paraskevopoulou Dimitra Christodoulaki
