Last week, during the unfortunate production of Sound of Music, there was a commercial that caught my attention.

I’d show it to you, but it does not seem to have been posted online anywhere.  It had cheerful Salvation Army types loading toys out of a truck into a kind of community center, then stocking the tables with all the toys.  Then it followed a nice lady as she walked the tables and found exactly what she was looking for.  The final scene was the lady and her husband watching their little boy’s delight on Christmas morning as he found the perfect toy under the tree.

So, do you have that image in your head?  Do you see the nice lady and her home and family?

I am thinking that you don’t.

The nice lady was white and well dressed; she would not have been out of place in a Toy R Us commercial.  Her home was well appointed, and her family was plain vanilla, stock photo white middle class family.  There was not a trace of “neediness” about them.

Does anyone else find this a bit alarming?  The state of our nation’s economy is such that the Salvation Army thinks it is a good idea to market their services to the very people they would normally be hitting up for donations. Considering that three years ago they were still focusing their ads on the homeless and needy, I regard this as a dispiriting development in terms of national prosperity.

With corporate profits at record highs and wages at record lows, though (see here and here*), it should shock no one. This is the new normal, folks, and my only question is whether the nice Republican family in the commercial will continue to vote into office those people who crashed our economy and continue to suck the nation dry.

———

*Fourth paragraph: “Workers who rely on paychecks for their income have been running in place, financially speaking.”  As opposed to… hedge funds?  You see the problem we have here??