PETA, the much-vilified animal-rights group, has launched its latest campaign — and like most of its recent efforts, it seeks to shock and awe people into paying attention.

As Adrants puts it:

Those radical exaggerators over at PETA are up to their old sensationalism again with the launch of Milk Gone Wild, a spoof on the Girls Gone Wild series which uses titillation and human udders to call attention to the apparent health hazards of drinking milk … PETA has, again, done what it does best; use sex and controversy to bring attention to its causes.

All true. PETA is radical. It does offend. In fact, what’s even more disturbing than the “Girls Gone Wild” parody is the actual glimpse into the life and death of dairy cows on the “Milk Gone Wild” site.

If you’ll indulge us for a moment, we just want to throw a little thought out there, for discussion purposes only — and then you can tell us how wrong we are.

Here’s the thought:

In the antebellum United States, most people — North and South — didn’t want to know about the messy details of slavery. Even plantation owners shielded themselves from it, leaving it to overseers to do the dirty work. People just wanted their cotton shirts and the other benefits of forced labor, and didn’t want to think about where it all came from. Abolitionists, as a result, were much-vilified.

Today, we want our gasoline, we want our perfume that’s been tested on animals, we want to have sex and abort the consequences, we want to eat meat but not see what happens in the slaughterhouse, and on and on.

We live in a world where if we don’t want to see all the unpleasant ingredients that go into the soup of our lives, we don’t have to. And we choose not to.

It’s a big cultural secret, the emperor’s new clothes. And the media, more often than not, is the royal tailor.

OK, so tell us we’re full of it. We can take it.

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