Getting What You Deserve

I deserve it, he deserves it, she deserves it.  It’s become a growing catch phrase in our culture.  I didn’t realize it until I was watching advertisements and it dawned on me that many of the commercials played to our entitlement mentality.  Advertisers don’t just pull phrases out of the air.  There is nearly always a reason for the words they chose.  There’s too little space or time to waste a single word.  Once the word ‘deserve’ made it to my consciousness, I began seeing and hearing it used all over the place.

Do we all deserve everything?  I remember my boys being in preschool.  Each day a child (or more accurately the child’s parents) would be assigned to bring the snacks for the class.  Sometimes the snacks weren’t well received by the students.  The staff had a saying they effectively used in such circumstances, ‘You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.’  They would make the entire class say it.  And it worked, the children seldom complained and had the choice between not eating anything or eating the food placed in front of them.  No teacher was running around looking for something that little Johnny would eat.  Johnny just went hungry.

I think we’ve become too concerned about feelings and expectations.  Perhaps a little toughening up is in order.   Trying to accommodate everyone leads us down a road where self-centeredness prevails.  There is evidence of this with the popular phrase, ‘Sorry, not sorry.’  From the moment I heard that phrase I thought it was snarky and unbecoming of the person using it.

I think we were better as a society when we had manners and were generally polite to each other.   We were also at our best when we learned when to just be graceful when we didn’t like something minor, such as the food placed in front of us.  Or, when we learned how to try and change our own circumstances when there was something major we were unhappy with.  Placing the expectations into the hands of others to help ourselves leaves us helpless and perhaps hopeless at some point.

I just saw a billboard the other day that said, ‘Every pet deserves a vet.’  I thought it should say ‘Don’t get a pet if you can’t afford a vet.’  We place ourselves in positions and then expect others to get us out of the situation.    It’s almost as if we’re regressing to children rather than progressing to maturity.
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 The definition of ‘deserve’ is to “do something or have or show qualities worthy of.” If most of us actually got what we deserved, we would most likely be getting much less than we have now.

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