The animal rights group PETA equates raising chickens in confinement to the Jewish Holocaust. Their ad featured photos of starving, tortured Jewish death camp prisoners interposed with photos of chickens in crates. The caption reads “The Holocaust on Your Plate.”

PETA’s intention was to create controversy but it barely raised a blip on the jaded horizon of America’s consciousness. Other than the Anti-Defamation League and a few columnists, the media has treated it as just another ad campaign. It’s almost like PETA is being ignored. Like a baby in a crowded room that has soiled its diaper and is stinking up the room, but no one wants to change it.

PETA must be wondering “Where did we go wrong?” In seeking some catastrophic mass killing to use in their advertisements, they probably considered the Twin Towers, the Titanic, the Galveston Hurricane, the San Francisco earthquake and the siege of Leningrad, but finally settled on the Jews.

Maybe we Americans are losing our sense of outrage as today’s continuous info/news barrage of the heinous, the depraved, the disgusting, the looney, the immoral and the frivolous suffocate us in their noxious gasses and numb our brains and hearts. We protect ourselves from these constant, vivid, visual reminders of the evil humans are capable of, by shutting them out. How else can we deal with 9/11, suicide bombers, serial killers, religious hatred, racism, abuse, injustice and this sense of futility.

PETA, whose self-proclaimed method of promotion is to shock the public, has been keeping a low profile since 9/11. Their frivolous attention-seeking statement that the United States would be “better off” if we were infected with Foot and Mouth disease, seemed a lot more ominous after the Al Queda attack of 9/11 when the bioterrorism threat became real. PETA must think the public can “take it” again, so they’ve come out with the Holocaust/chicken ad.

It is reasonable to think that there are some advertisements that respectable newspapers or magazines won’t accept. But a full page PETA ad in the Des Moines Register in 1991 comparing hog slaughtering to serial killer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer has proven that is often not the case.

PETA continues to extend the limits of what will be tolerated by the silent majority. Unfortunately for PETA, the info entertainment world is running neck and neck in the race to shock us themselves, with their profaning of all that is sacred. Bryant Gumbel’s promo for his sports expose’ program speaks for them all when he says, “Nothing is out of bounds!”

So PETA is left trivializing the deaths of six million Jews and it doesn’t even make the front page. They must be asking themselves, what’s this world coming to.