I have decided that I will NOT use the ME Rewards sent to me weekly by the Co-op Stores. ME Rewards is their new promotion, standing for Member Experience. But when I opened up the first ME Rewards e-mail and scrolled down, what jumped off the page for me was ME, ME, ME, ME!
And what I thought was – we teach our pre-schoolers not to say, ME, ME, ME, ME! But here are these awards that are saying, ME, ME, ME, ME! And this from a cooperative store that was founded on the principle that everyone benefits when we work together. ME, ME, ME, ME seems like an odd promotional campaign for a Cooperative store (and I e-mailed to tell them so.)
So, I’ve decided that I will not use the ME rewards, even if they really mean Member Experience. But if you need to use them to help feed your family, please don’t stop because of my perspective.
I am bothered by how self-centered our society is becoming. You can’t tell me that someone, in putting together the Co-op e-mails, didn’t notice that the campaign would be ME, ME, ME, ME – and somehow they thought that would attract people’s attention. I can get what I want, personalized just to me, me, me, me! They believed it would sell more and it probably does.
It is so easy just to move along the paths upon which advertising and societal trends take us. Sometimes we have to, just to survive. But I also think about what our faith tells us. In Acts 2:43-47, there is a beautiful passage about life among the first followers of Jesus. It says that awe and wonder filled everyone and they held all things in common, selling and sharing their possessions so that no one was in need.
That is very hard to do in our society as it is structured today, but we still can hold the value of sharing for the common good at the core of what we do. For me, that means paying attention to how advertising and trends are pushing me toward self-centred materialism. The ME, ME, ME, ME campaign jumped right out, but there are many so much subtler ways that I am pulled along with the personal entitlement that society encourages.
I often hear people blame the millennials for being an “entitled” generation, but I don’t see that. I see just as much entitlement in the baby boomers and other generations in between. Truthfully, North American society is an entitled society. Generally, we are quick to name what we should be able to have and do and claim our rights! But what about our responsibilities to each other – our responsibilities to make sure that everyone has food, shelter and a way to have a meaningful life.
We teach our children to share. We believe that it is very important that they learn that. We discourage the ME, ME, ME kind of thinking in children. Yet we have a society that is built on self-centred materialism, and the belief that we all have the right to have whatever we want, no matter the cost to other people, to society, and to our environment. Interesting, isn’t it?
Even though I embrace the ideal of Acts 2:43-47, it disturbs me how much I am shaped by the society in which I live. I have given my life to following the Way of Jesus and claim his teachings as foundational and formative for my daily living. But then I consider just how much I have literally bought into the self-centred materialism of North American society.
So, I’m not going to use the ME (Member Experience) rewards offered by the Co-op stories. It is hard because there are some good deals for exactly the items I would purchase (individualized, of course). Yet, for me, this is a spiritual practice – a way of claiming the teachings of Jesus that sharing what we have for the common good is more important than ME, ME, ME, ME!
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