David McElroy

Television commercials frustrate me. I don’t even own a television anymore, but I still stream football and basketball games on my MacBook, so I can’t escape all TV ads.

The culture we choose to allow around us teaches us what “normal” behavior is like in that culture. We’re rarely conscious of this, but culture shapes what children will become and it reinforces those cultural norms for adults.

Before mass media existed, we learned from the behavior of family, friends, associates and strangers around us. But once mass media arrived, that role was increasingly filled by movies, popular music, television shows — and now by social media.

Television commercials are one of the most important components of that culture. Huge companies pay smart and talented people a lot of money to manipulate us — to make us want to give them our money. They don’t necessarily intend to define what the culture is, but they do. In part, they define the culture and, in part, they also reflect what certain cultural elites force them to project.

Since I avoid most of what popular culture has become — because I believe the culture has become dangerously dysfunctional — it’s often jarring to encounter it. And I’ve been feeling that way lately when I see the “normal families” in these commercials.

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Until Wednesday night, I hadn’t seen Larry for roughly 30 years. When we were in high school, we seemed to be inseparable. He was my best friend. And we were close collaborators on all sorts of projects — at school, at church and in our personal lives.

This image is from the newspaper staff photo in our senior yearbook. I was the editor and he was the news editor. That was his title, but everybody knew that it really meant “second in command” for the entire staff, regardless of department.

In college, he was in Birmingham and I was in Tuscaloosa, but we still saw each other quite a bit. After that, though, we went in very different directions. We never had a falling out. We were simply busy with very different lives. I stayed in the South — mostly in Alabama — and he ended up in Washington, D.C.

He’s home to visit his mother for Christmas this week, so we had dinner Wednesday night and talked for three hours. We could have talked much longer, but we were the last ones in the restaurant and the staff made it pretty obvious they were ready to leave.

As I drove home, I reflected on how I felt to see him and to look back on our joint past through the lens of our present lives. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, it suddenly occurred to me that I had been unconsciously terrified in high school about whether people would like me — and I somehow never worried about that with Larry. That gave me a new appreciation for something I’d never before considered.

And then Thursday night, a woman I barely know randomly told me that everybody likes me — and that everybody thought I was a joy to be around — so I’ve been thinking all night about the strange coincidence of these two contradictory pieces of information.

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I hadn’t seen Angie for several years. When I had first known her — about five or six years ago — she had been a straight-laced college student working her way through a nursing program. When I saw her this week, everything had changed.

The last time I had bumped into her, it had been about three years ago. She had been in a restaurant on a Sunday evening with a group of people from her church. She had seemed happy and content — looking and acting the part of a beautiful young woman with a bright future ahead of her.

This week, though, everything was different. She’s pregnant. She’s miserable. She told me the father-to-be disappeared as soon as she told him she was pregnant. The guy was immediately living with another woman and wants nothing to do with the baby.

A female friend who was with Angie that night started telling me about the man who helped bring our mutual friend to this point. Between the two of them, they painted a picture of a loser — an arrest record, drug habits, bad character, no future — who Angie had put up with for no good reason.

As I listened to their story, things seemed obvious. Angie had lowered her standards a little bit at first. She had lied to herself about what the man was. She let him lead her — one little step at a time — into things that had been completely foreign to her.

And now she’s alone and miserable. She slowly painted herself into a corner — one tiny bad decision at a time — and now she sees no way out of the hole into which she dragged herself.

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