Values miseducation in advertising: Teaching kids the concept of shame

You must have seen this on TV.

Shot opens to a boy emerging from the gate of a nice house in what seemed like an upscale subdivision.

He is next seen at the back seat of a car, with his apparent father navigating an old model car around the neighborhood.

The boy then sees a pretty girl, his crush, loitering about her home’s front yard, and he promptly slinks into the back seat, away from the gaze of the girl that makes his young heart flutter.

The father notices this and is devastated that his son is embarrassed to be seen riding in a car that has served the family well for a very long time. He had to do something.

In the next frame, the boy proudly banners his face on the window of a new car, hoping that her girl crush sees him aboard, this time in a nice, new car.  Of course she did, and he slumped back on the backseat, on cloud nine.

The father was, too.  The loan he made for a downpayment on a car, that won’t be totally his for the next few years, is all worth it.

I don’t know if it’s just me but this TV commercial makes me sick.  The message that it is pushing is this: If what you have is not new, branded or expensive, then shame on you, you poor you.  But it’s alright, you insecure you, because if you can’t afford it just yet and you can't wait to save for it, then you can always take out a loan that would assuage your poor ego that, yeah you can keep up the veneer that you belong to a class that comes and goes in style if you are only willing to pay the price of being indebted for a purchase that you don’t even need to do if you are not so damn insecure about how people would look at you if you don’t own something new or expensive, you poor insecure you.

No,  you don’t explain to your son that your car is way cooler and infinitely much more priceless than anything new or expensive because that’s the car that has brought his mother to the hospital when he was due for his first day to cry.  Or that it is also the same car that has brought the entire family to endless journeys, resulting to countless smiles and fadeless memories.  Or that it is the same four wheeler that you hope he learns to drive and take care someday because it simply has the entire family history etched in every kilometer logged in its odometer.  No, you don’t do those things.   Instead, you want to teach him that what is important is what is superficial, nice and new.

Then you grow old, faded and a bit clumsy because you can no longer tell whether you are entering your front door or getting out of it.  And in your lucid moment, you would wonder why your full grown son does not drop by to visit you even after you have thought him everything he needs to know about valuing and accumulating new and expensive things.  You taught him well.  You are old, faded and you smell like years compressed in one prune-like shell of your old-self.  That’s why.