Jun 10, 2013 4 min read

The modern computer is an amazing device. It can allow you to perform a myriad of tasks — almost effortlessly.

You can conduct commerce; engage in an ever-increasing variety of communications; listen to music; watch movies; store and retrieve all manner of information, simply by clicking a mouse button. For instance, I couldn’t possibly have written 260 of my “Did You Know?” columns without a computer and the information I find each week online.

In fact, if you’ve read the column I wrote this week, one of the items involved a woman who got arrested and took a bag full of cash ($3,610) with her to jail in 1952. I was curious about what $3,610 would be worth in 2013 dollars. The answer is $31,277.72.

It only took me a matter of seconds and Google to solve the question, “What would $3,610 in 1952 be worth today?”

No matter how obscure the question, somebody has asked it, and somebody, in turn, has posted the answer to it on the Internet. These are all of the wonderful doors that computer technology have opened for us all. But there’s the bad stuff.

Consumer fraud, thanks to nefarious online schemes, are at an all-time high. Online thievery continues to exist, thanks to a growing number of culprits who’ve learned how to thwart Internet security and rob bank accounts without having to leave the comfort of their computer monitors.

There’s another, less publicized, bane of the digital age — anonymity.

You can say or do anything you’d like to whomever you’d like to say or do it to online, without ever letting them know who you are. Consider the case Cheerios’ now famous 30-second ad that kicked up quite a stir last week.

That ad had been running for awhile before General Mills decided to put it on its YouTube.com channel. It wasn’t meant to be controversial. It just happened to have featured a beautiful biracial little girl, her white mother and her black father. Suddenly, anonymous racists flooded YouTube with their vicious rhetoric, so much, that General Mills, the maker of Cheerios, had to cut off the ad’s comment section.

AdWeek, which had been monitoring those responses, reported that some of the postings contained the vitriolic words “troglodytes” and “racial genocide.” And there were references to (as they always do in these situations) Nazis. This, in 2013, when the country has a biracial president and is supposed to have advanced toward a “post-racial” society.

But this isn’t about the foolishness of the nameless, faceless cowards who think that America is supposed only to be comprised of monochromatic couples. It’s about the will of General Mills, which is taking pride in presenting a family that looks as appropriately American that it could have appeared in any Norman Rockwell illustration.

“Consumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad. At Cheerios, we know there are many kinds of families, and we celebrate them all,” says Camille Gibson, the brand’s vice president of marketing.

While General Mills has cut off comments, it’s left the ability to “like” or “dislike” the ad. Of the more than two million people who’ve watched it online, nearly 30,000 have “liked” it, while less that 2,000 people have “disliked” it.

Since the controversy gained national attention, MSN.com has conducted its own poll. As I write this, nearly 400K people have voted their opinions about the ad. A whopping 315,000 people (84 percent) have said they “have no problem with it,” while only 45,000 people (12 percent) claim they “find it inappropriate.”

Cheerios is America. And that’s what that ad depicts. Whether you agree with it or not — there are many American couples who just happen to have the same pigmentation as the one we see depicted in that commercial. I fully expect the sales of Cheerios to rise before this uncalled for controversy dies down.

And hopefully, in the near future, General Mills might really attempt to make the head’s of some close-minded Americans explode.

Let’s hear it for the first openly gay couple that sits down and has a nice couple of bowls of Cheerios!

Uniontown native Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net