“Show them you care”

Regular readers know that this week I have returned from my current residence in East Asia to my family home in the United States. This post is designed to be a commentary on the current state of affairs of American society, and I apologize in advance if this comes across as another rant.

My father and I traveled through upstate New York last week. As we traveled north towards the state capital, we pulled over at a rest stop where I spotted this sign on display at a Roy Rogers.

Let’s face it: if you wanted to do something—anything—about the fact that young men and women are dying in Iraq at the hands of homicidal Islamists, a little frugality in your daily life to volunteer resources and funds to our troops is the way to go. Failing that, you could support the familes of the troops through church and charity. Yet instead, we’re being told that the way to help our troops is obscene, meaningless consumption. It would be one thing to ignore this behavior, but to justify it with cheap patriotism? You could not if you tried find a better picture to encapsulate what is wrong with the United States today.

“Show them you care” is just one example. Everyday I must see yet another obscenely overweight person roll their fat bottom into the driver’s seat of their new Jeep Cherokee, complete with the magnetic yellow “Support the Troops” ribbon stuck to the rear bumper (and to complete the irony, often with a “Save Wildlife” license plate). What is wrong with this picture? More and more Americans are gourging themselves on consumer goods they do not need, wasting resources in a way that is unhealthy for the people involved and society at large. And then these people try to assuage their guilt with gimics such as “carbon credits,” ribbons and bracelets dedicated to the latest trendy cause, and other public displays of caring that result in no real benefit to solving the real issues at hand.

Most critics of this style of modern American consumerism are leftists. But surely the virtue of stoicism and self control are traditional conservative values. I don’t think any readers are the type of people to be suckered into buying a super-sized soft drink on the grounds that it’s doing our troops a favor, but just in case you get the urge, hear me out: using patriotism to capture your consumer dollar is a cheap gimic that does no benefit to our troops or our country. Show them you care and don’t supersize.