With the City of Bloomington’s decision to take down her signs last week, Lauren Spierer is once again present and immediate in campus discussion.
Though the case and the circumstances of taking down the signs are disappointing, ultimately I stand by the city’s decision. We cannot live in the past forever, and we have to forge on for the sake of future students.
But that doesn’t mean we can lose our way.
While eating lunch on Kirkwood the other day, I noticed a sign for Shop 4 Spierer — an event taking place at Hillel Friday. The event is sponsored by LF Scarsdale and will feature a trunk show from the clothing retailer, which claims to be “a trendy boutique that has amazing pieces for any occasion! There will be a very large selection available at the trunk show — from dresses, to accessories, to jeans and tops, LF has it all!”
The poster features a Miley Cyrus look-a-like giving a seductive gaze to the camera. The event title is in a girly-sexy-cute typeface.
I was appalled.
I’ve been fairly distant in all of the events to benefit the search for Spierer — not for lack of compassion, but simply because they have been trending more around the greek community. So I was shocked to see that this event has actually happened a few times prior to LF’s Friday sale.
But those were different. For a trunk show at the IU Art Museum during November 2012, the poster at least fe atured Spierer’s face.
The event claims it wants to promote awareness for the Spierer family and the situation at large, but how can it do that while making the event look sexy with a random stock model as their main form of advertising?
Now, the only step to awareness that the event is taking is a series of hashtags: the first, #SHOP4SPIERER and the second, #FindLauren. A much different approach from their previous, better-intentioned endeavors.
We have an uncanny ability to turn help and good into self-serving, egotistical propaganda. It happens on the national and international scale regularly, but it’s so much more distressing on our local level.
LF is selling “cutting-edge” clothes to assist in the disappearance of a girl from Indiana. The corporation has no ties to Indiana. They have no stores anywhere in the state.
It’s nice of them to want to give aid to the Spierer family, but the organization now looks good, has hammered home that it’s super trendy and has its website posted all over a part of the country that it hasn’t exactly marketed to yet.
It’s hard to believe LF is doing this all out of the goodness of its heart.
So the Spierer case might be winding down, or at least taking a different route, but that doesn’t mean we can lose all morals and use her as a marketing tool.
We still have to uphold honor and decency.
It’s hard to see those two aspects in Shop 4 Spierer.
— sjostrow@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Sam Ostrowski on Twitter @ostrowski_s_j.
