My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #3, July 20, 1998

JUST DESSERTS

Probably it was McDonald's that started it, with the advertising slogan, "You deserve a break today." Then there was the really expensive hair dye that Cybill Shepherd treated herself to, telling us, "I'm worth it." Now we can hardly turn on the TV without somebody telling us that we deserve to treat ourselves. And oh, do we believe them. If, as doctors tell us, most Americans are overweight, how much of that is due to us agreeing that yes, we do indeed deserve to treat ourselves to a doughnut, a shake, or an enormous slab of steak?

That's exactly what these ads are designed to do: make us say, Hey, you're right, I AM worth it. They're intended to short-circuit our brains, and appeal directly to the greedy little kid in us, the one who can't even wait til Dad takes his coat off to ask him "What did you bring me?"

Of course the ad writers want to sidestep our brains--they'd rather not have us asking inconvenient questions like: "Why do I deserve it?" and "If I deserve a reward, is THIS the reward I want?" and "If I treat myself to THIS, will I have the money left for what I really wanted?" Not to mention, "Why is it that when I deserve a reward, you become richer and I become poorer?"

Our brains might, in fact, ask some really hard questions. Like "What do I truly want?" and "What am I going to have to do to get it?" If what I truly want is to fit back into a size 10 someday, I'm not going to get there by answering the siren call of McDonald's French fries.

Once the old frontal lobe kicks in, it might ask questions like "How can we afford all the things the ads tell us we're entitled to?" and "If we buy that luxury car, treat ourselves to that luxury cruise, will we be able to buy the house we really want, or send our kids to college?" And of course if we don't ask those questions, we may find we've frittered all our money away on the stupid little stuff we didn't really care about all that much.

We might ask whether buying stuff really makes us cool and trendy, like the ads promise, and whether in fact we need to be cool and trendy. We've turned into a nation of feckless grasshoppers, dancing away the summer and putting less away for the future than any other developed nation, because the ants who work hard and plan and save are really really boring. (How do we know this? It's what the ads show us.) But if we want to arrive at some long-term expensive goal, we have to be willing to be a little bit boring, forgo some parties and expensive doodads, and save the money instead. I want to take a really big risk someday--quit my job to become a full-time writer. Without a guaranteed paycheck, I'll be meeting the mortgage on whatever my brain can turn out that people are willing to pay me for. That's why I need to save and invest my money, so I'll have a little something extra to live on.

It's bad enough that the ads induce us to fill in the unstated BECAUSE--I deserve this because I worked hard today, or somebody was mean to me, or I checked another big project off my to-do list. What could be worse is, the ads might be teaching us that no BECAUSE is needed, that we're entitled to everything for no better reason than that we exist.

You see, they don't tell us how we can afford to buy the stuff--you hardly ever see anybody actually WORKING in the ads. If this doesn't bother you in the abstract, think about it in the concrete form of little kids, raised in poverty, staring at a TV screen that tells them they deserve all these goodies they can't afford. The ads don't tell them how they CAN manage to afford the stuff someday, except for those ads for lotteries and sweepstakes and credit cards. To cultivate that kind of wanting without also showing a plausible legal means of getting is to create a kind of social dynamite.

It seems to me that if we deserve anything just because we exist, it's both more and less than a burger or a break. We sure don't "deserve" a fancy car or a nice house. If I "deserve" my house, it's because I worked hard to earn the money for it, and saved that money by NOT buying other things, including a car. But I damn well don't deserve to have a house given to me, nor does anybody else. Even Habitat for Humanity doesn't just give houses away; when they build a house, they give it to someone who has helped in the building of it.

I suggest that what we DO deserve, just because we exist, is to be treated like we're human. Not librarians or clerks or computer geeks, not Blacks or teenagers or Joe Sixpack, but our individual selves. Lucy Poulin deplored how differently she was treated when she was a worker in a chicken factory and when she was a Carmelite nun, because the uniforms were different, the jobs were different, "But I was the same person."

Children, being totally dependent, are a special case. They deserve food, shelter, clothing, and protection from abuse, and if they're not born to somebody who can give them that, a civilized society must provide it for them. But they also deserve at least one adult who loves them and helps them become kind and responsible adults; they deserve a society that understands that if they don't have a decent future, neither do we.

Do we deserve a break today? Almost certainly. But we don't need to make McDonald's richer to get it. We could give someone we love a hug, or lie on the grass, finding pictures in the clouds, or read a favorite book to a child. We could run a race for charity, or do just about anything that makes us feel good about ourselves, and good about the world.

That's really the best break of all, isn't it?

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.