At a retreat I was at a few weeks ago, a speaker talked about the great temptation of today of just “checking out” rather than engaging in the world and its problems. You sit on the couch and watch worthless, stupefying cable television programming late into the night. A symptom of this disease: You know about Snuggies, the blanket with arms, advertised on such programming.
Most of us at the retreat laughed sheepishly because, indeed, we had seen the commercials for Snuggies, the type of mail-order product that garners the label, “As seen on TV!” in stores.
It turns out, though, that Chicago young people are doing something good, sort of, with their sloth-like desire to be warm and numb their minds—they are hitting up city bars to drink in their Snuggies with the proceeds from the first annual Snuggies Pub Crawl going to an orphanage in Tanzania.
Oddly, the event has become incredibly popular with 3,000 Snuggie wearers signed up. Young adults in other cities are planning similar pub crawls as well.
I'm not condoning such behavior, but it’s an interesting story—what’s behind the event’s popularity?
I suspect it’s somewhere between this tug-of-war between caring, wanting to be part of something bigger and apathy (as symbolized by the Snuggies, to go back to the retreat speaker). Drinking all day long with a thousand of your closest friends allows you to “check out” just like vegging in front of the TV by yourself. It’s also interesting to note that the news coverage hardly mentions the charity connection.
