Dang, if I ever needed proof about how materialistic North American society has become, I'd need look no further than the Toyota commercial that I saw (while watching hockey ^_~) tonight. I don't remember everything that was on the commercial, but the one line that stuck with me said something like "can you assemble happiness?"
Now, rhetorical questions are great because they don't provide any evidence whatsoever, but nonetheless, they manage to get the reader/listener to come up with the desired answer all on his/her own. Obviously the answer that the company wanted the reader to come up with was "yes," yes you can assemble happiness, and you can find it assembled in Toyota cars. =/
I'm not saying that people would really buy this kind of thinking (at least, I hope not), but it's still kind of scary that a company would pretty much come right out and say that happiness can be bought. Doesn't it say something about how dangerously materialistic our society has become? (There's that rhetorical question again! A very handy rhetorical device, don't you think? (Whoops, and there it is again! I can't seem to escape them today! ^_~)) Despite the fact that I'm quite a spendthrift, and therefore have quite a lot of "stuff," I still would never go so far as to believe that happiness can, or even should depend on material possessions. But I suspect that that type of thinking is endemic in North American culture today. Buy this and have fun. Accumulate more stuff and be happier.
Even our subway (TTC) ads reflect this type of gross consumptive trend. They don't encourage people to take the TTC because it reduces pollution and helps the environment, they promote it as a way to save enough money annually to make large purchases, like a big screen tv. Geez, even I didn't give those ads a second thought until today, and I've seen them dozens of times. It's a pretty hardgoing battle for control over our own minds nowadays, and the scary thing is, most of the time we don't even realize how ads are competing for influence over our thought processes.
