I deserve $1 million, how about you?
Posted on February 25, 2008
Filed Under Must read, Off the beaten path
Every once in a while I’ll watch one of the new game shows that seem to be inundating our nighttime programing. Whether it’s ‘Deal or no Deal’, ‘1 vs 100′, etc, they tend to be addicting. But what I’ve truly found fascinating in the this new game show world is the use of the word ‘deserve’. As in ‘I deserve the million dollars’ or ‘he/she works really hard and really deserves the money’. Really, because I work really hard and I know lots of people who do the same. Do they deserve $1 million? What about people in third world countries? There’s no doubt that they work and suffer far more than we do, don’t they deserve $1 million too?
Websters dictionary defines deserve as: to be worthy of : merit <deserves another chance> intransitive verb : to be worthy, fit, or suitable for some reward or requital. It used to be that $1 million was a lot of money. As in ’solve all your problems, welcome to easy street’ money. Today, by the time you buy a house a couple of cars and invest for the kids education, your million dollars is gone and then some. Still it’s a lot of jing and could certainly be life changing. But it’s the concept of deserving that still makes me scratch my head.
What makes any of us so deserving? For the most part, we’re all about the same, we work, we come home, we spend some time with our family and friends, we do our best to pay our bills and try to squeeze in a vacation once or twice a year. So what makes me more deserving than you or you more deserving than the family down the street? Nothing, nothing at all. I don’t deserve a million dollars and neither do you. Sure we all want a million dollars, duh. But deserve? Get real. Sadly, I think the media and pop culture are mostly to blame for our overblown sense of worth. They glamorize every ‘C’ list celebrity they can create, they bombard us with stories of the poor kid who made it big by acting, singing, playing sports, whatever. They’ve done such a great job promoting the rags to riches stories, that we’ve created whole generations of people who are almost literally standing in line waiting for their E true Hollywood story.
Being the spouse of a teacher I hear stories almost daily from the playground of kids who are just sure they deserve this or that. From iPods to cellphones, to laptops, to $100 sneakers, generations are coming up with the expectation of having everything they want. Then they grow up, go off to college and enter the workforce with the shocking reality that most of them won’t start out making 100K a year or even 50K. Many will get something less than 40K and will be shocked at what their employer expects from them. Yeah, that’s why they call it work.
The reality is, there is no lottery waiting to be won, you’re not the next American Idol, you won’t ever play in the NFL, NBA, etc, and you’ll never have a hit TV or movie career. You don’t deserve it. What you do deserve is the opportunity to work hard, make a nice living and provide a better life for your kids. That’s what you deserve, that’s what our founding fathers fought and died for, opportunity, nothing more. There is nothing in the Bill of Rights about getting an easy million dollars. That music in your head isn’t from ‘Deal or no Deal’ after you won the big bucks, it’s your alarm clock; so get out of bed and get to work.
Until next time…
[tags] million dollars, deserve, easy money, bill of rights
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