1971: ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke, furnish it with love. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’. 

 

 

2018: ‘Diet Coke makes me feel good. Just do you’.  

So many times we say things like ‘I don’t know what we’re gonna do. We’ve lost all of our morals. We so bad now, even Jesus wouldn’t have us anymore’.

These are things I’ve heard. And to a point, they’re not arguable. We are bad. We are narcissistic. We are all about ourselves.

Personally, I believe that the ‘I’phone started it all. Putting the prefix ‘I’ before many of our daily words made us turn away from other people and migrate more inwards toward our own selfish person. Well, that and maybe the post 70’s selfishness was caused from the invention of bucket seats so that your girlfriend had to sit all the way across from you in the truck and you couldn’t hold her hand anymore without knocking over a stack of Michael Jackson cassette tapes on the center console.

It’s all about ‘me’ now. Problem is that many of a younger generation don’t see that because they weren’t around when it WASN’T all about them. They don’t know what it feels like to feel good inside about helping each other out. Not without wearing the right clothes, scripting it and posting it on our social media. They don’t know what they don’t have so they can’t pass it on down.

We do have a section of people that are making headway to correct this. We have lots of electronic means to give back nowadays. http://www.gofundme.com and so forth. Those are outstanding modern-day electronic options and allows regular people like me to show some human compassion and altruism through my wallet.

But then now we do have a group of young upstarts that want to lie in the street and protest a cattle truck or women CONTINUING to seek equal rights by not wearing a sanitary napkin and protesting during strategic times.

Now tell me, what message does that send to people? Right…’look at me’ is the message they’re all sending now.

How do we go back to simple things such as ‘Teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ rather than listening to the spewing political hatred that imprints our minds daily all around us?

How do we honestly love our neighbor again without wanting something from it for ourselves?

I, for one, don’t know that answer. But I noticed during a preview to the Rock flick last night, Rampage (which I thoroughly enjoyed, thank you very much Dwayne and George) that the Coke commercials have changed dramatically. And these changes are reflected in our thinking and actions since 1971 when marriages were forever, people had no fear of stopping to pick up a stranger for a lift and by gosh, every person in the stadium that could stood up for the National Anthem.

My friends, I have news for you;

We’ve been misled and we’ve been lied to.

It’s not about you.

It’s not about me.

It’s about……..

us.

That’s the best that I can tell about it,

~Mark