So it’s Sunday, and I’m watching the Super Bowl. I love football (most of the time), but there’s something pretty great about the ads, too; I usually end up at Super Bowl parties that tend to quiet down only when it’s commercial time. The ads don’t always impress me—OK, they rarely impress me—but there’s something that keeps me watching. Sometimes it’s a funny sight gag, or good ol’ nostalgia, or an exciting trailer for a new movie (“Cowboys and Aliens” anyone?). But all of a sudden, something made me stop shoving delicious, healthy snacks into my gullet—a commercial so rife with insensitivity, yet so subtle that I nearly missed it: an ad for Groupon.com.

These days, it takes a lot for a Super Bowl commercial to offend me. Even my sensitive Resident Advisor-tude gets a little calmer on Super Bowl Sunday; while I don’t appreciate the sentiments some ads present, I tend to take them in stride and hope for a better day. And this year, with the exception of some crappy GoDaddy commercials that no one really watched, the misogyny count felt lower than normal.

Groupon.com’s ad, on the other hand, brought a different kind of insensitivity to a number of ads. Here’s part of the voice-over for one of them:

“The people of Tibet are in trouble; their very culture is in jeopardy; but they still whip up an amazing fish curry. And because 200 of us bought a Groupon.com, we’re each getting $30 worth of Tibetan food for just $15 at a Himalayan restaurant in Chicago.” The ad closes with the tagline: “Save the money.”

The two other Groupon ads I saw were related to fast-dying populations of whales and the quickly disappearing Amazonian rainforests; each ended with similar turns. While it’s pretty clear that they’re trying to poke fun at some of some of the more stereotypical causes (Free Tibet, Save the Whales/Rainforests), I couldn’t understand the point of doing so. The Groupon blog says that the intent of the commercials was to talk about “discounts as a noble cause,” but this leaves something out. In visiting the website from the ad campaign, I found an option to donate to each of these causes, but I just wonder why they didn’t explain this option in the ads. If these commercials are partly supposed to call for viewers to use their saved money to donate to worthy causes, they do a pretty terrible job.

We live in a time and place with a lot of human activism, which can be both good and overwhelming. Part of the reason the causes Groupon picks on get short shrift is because of their ubiquity and because people can get “involved” in them with a bumper sticker or a few dollars here or there. This makes the ads funny because they’re true, but only to a point. By sending up activism, we become even more cynical. Rather, we need to be called to activism every day, as many of us are on this campus. Find causes that matter and do more than buy a bumper sticker. Write an article for a student publication, join a group—heck, save some money on Groupon and do something useful with it. Just don’t belittle your cause, because that doesn’t help anyone.