Consume, Consume, maggot for all that you’re worth
We’ve owned your parents, and we’ve bought you from birth
So give us your money, we know what to do
We can help out, we know what’s good for you

Why do we allow companies to tell us what we need? Why do we allow them to dictate to our children what toys they must have to be cool? Or for that matter, why do we allow them to tell our kids that have to be cool. It makes no sense to me. When did the opinions of others, which has been skewed and adjusted through advertising and celebrity endorsements, dictate our self worth?

Looking back on my childhood, I know I was outside the mainstream crowd. I didn’t play sports, I didn’t hang out with the cool kids after school, I didn’t go to the beach house with friends during the summer. Yet I still felt the need to fit it. Even within the group of outcasts, there were rules to be accepted.

In middle school I hung out with the skaters. We would go out every weekend and skate around town, work on our tricks, and generally just hang out. Nothing to difficult about this. Not a whole lot of skill involved at the beginner levels, which we were all at back then. Because of this, the skater group became the de facto group for kids not fitting into the other groups. We were generally an accepting crowd, but there were exceptions. We judged other skaters by their shoes. We judged other skaters by their boards. We judged others by their clothes (If you had multiple pairs of jnco pants, you were cool). We weren’t afraid to judge others and push them out of the inner group. The exact thing we hated the cool kids for doing, we did to others.

This is exactly what Black Friday represents. It is your chance to be greedy. It is your chance to tell others you deserve a big screen tv. It is your chance to tell others you will kick, scream, fight, and cheat to get what you want. After all, you deserve it, right?

So that’s fine. Go spend a ton of money, but don’t complain to me that times are tough and you have to cut back. Go buy a bunch of stuff manufactured in China, but don’t complain to me if your job gets outsourced to a foreign country. Go push others around and fight to save money on a video game system, but don’t complain about CEOs fighting for money from congress. Go buy everything that’s “hot” this year, but don’t complain about companies targeting children in their advertisements.

This Black Friday I won’t be listening to any double standards.