VIDEO: New factual ad depicts horrifying alternate universe where you can buy beer in convenience stores

0:00 “Let’s do this,” one of the babies says, bracing himself for the roller coaster ride of buying liquor at a convenience store, already drunk on the prospect of not seeing beer rattle down a conveyor belt.

0:01 One child hands another infant some money to buy the demon liquor with. It is unclear why this exchange has to happen given that: a) they all enter the store together; b) everyone knows that convenience store clerks would sell liquor to a fetus, no questions asked.

0:02 We see the convenience store clerk. Hunched, podgy, defeated, twice-divorced (probably), his nicotine-yellowed hair combed back across his head—a pitiable bid for self-preservation practiced by a man who has quite obviously given up. He eyes the toddlers as they enter the store. “Yes,” he thinks, licking his lips (figuratively). “Some youth I can secondhand corrupt through my own negligence.”

0:04 One of the tots greets the clerk, as if to say, “Hello.” This is the sort of recondite code that transpires between underage alcoholics-in-training and their free-market enablers.

0:05 The Boy In The Black Jacket—whose confidence marks him as the leader of this hell-raising pack of no-goodniks—grabs an off-brand bottle of brown liquor, as if he’s done it one thousand times before.

0:06 Another of the nurslings grabs an unmarked twelver. Bottom-shelf stuff. Swill. Crap. They don’t care. It contains alcohol—their only respite from the suffocating banality of youth. They’ll acquire taste and discernment somewhere further along the line in their lifetime of debilitating drug abuse.

0:09 “Eeeeeh!” says Child With The Gold Chain, as if he were The Fonz from Happy Days. The clerk, whose brain is a shapeless muddle of regret and dated pop-culture references, understands this. “These are very cool guys,” he must think. “They are as cool as The Fonz.”

0:12 “Woah! Look at this!” exclaims our immoral shopkeeper, impressed by the heroic appetites of children who should be running around out of doors chasing June bugs, working grass stains into their OshKosh B’gosh overalls. Our clerk cheerily bags the liquor, never asking for identification or proof of age. Why bother?

0:15 Our perspective shifts to that of a security camera. It is April 11, 2014, 7:21 p.m. And your children—yes, YOUR LITERAL SONS—are buying alcohol from a man who probably sleeps in his car parked outside a No Frills.

0:19 The clerk returns change to the little baby boys. This is a normal step in the whole sequence of exchanging cash for goods. But here it acquires a sinister dimension. Who knows what the children will purchase with the returned money? Tobacco? Crack-cocaine? Firearms? Some sort of experimental laser calibrated to destroy the very fabric of morality? It is impossible to say.

0:20 “Later Al!” one of the youngsters says to the clerk. Al! They know his name! This has happened before! This has always been happening! Our youth exist in a perpetually spinning flywheel of malfeasance! And you can’t spell “malfeasance” without “Al.” Imagine the infinitude of Als that exist across a sprawling continuum of laissez-faire convenience stores, holding our children’s noses while he pries their mouths open with a filthy shoehorn and pours shitty Russian Prince vodka down their tender gullets? I am honestly vomiting all over the place at the thought—or rather, the FACT.

0:21 In the factual video’s most pointed image, Hoodie Child makes eye contact with the camera. It’s like he’s petitioning for us to recognize the fear, the frailty, the humanity in his eyes. He is begging to be caught, if only so he can be extricated from this system of violence that he is being mercilessly churned through, like so much barley being ground, ground into beer, beer that you—a tiny infant child who is illegal—can buy literally wherever, unencumbered by law, unshackled by morality, adrift in the eddies of an unbounded evil for which there is no name.

0:27 Whoops never mind. The whole thing is just an alarmist advertisement paid for by The Beer Store, a foreign-owned corporate monopoly determined to protect their own bottom line.