Ask Not What Your Country...

I've been wondering where Marge went? You know her. She was the hair dresser/manicurist that was really selling you Palmolive soap. Where is she? And the Maytag man? Though he didn't work much. And the gas station attendant asking, "Check under your hood?" The local butcher that had the bovine femur for your dog. These are images from ads, but they painted a picture of people earning a living, and being happy, serving others. Providing a service to others. Have you tried to find someone like that recently? When was the last time you went to a TV repairman? They are gone and with the new government TV standards for cable/satellite connections analog TV's will be dead by 2009.
Think about the images of people today in advertising and we have few pictures of people serving people. When we do, the servers are background screens to the main people having fun consuming or playing or cavorting or sitting WiFiing. People closed off to others.
Yesterday I read this article http://www.slate.com/id/2181786/nav/tap3/ and I started thinking about service and people and happiness. I don't know this man, but I know others like him. Not expensive French restaurant owners, but people that are good at serving their fellow man. People that enjoy making others people happy and by doing so, make themselves happy. Somewhere after the I/Me/Finding Myself 60's-70's, the Greedy80's, and the Slick 90's the images of people changed. We are no longer happy where we came from. We need more and we need it now.
We have become people like this. http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/HomeMortgageSavings/MiddleClassRealityEssentials.aspx
Should it surprise us that we have housing and mortgage problems? Every article I've read about the new $2500 car from India, the Tata Nano, touted its price and the chance for almost everyone to own a car and be mobile and what a boon it will be for the Indian standard of living. But each article also mentioned that this will mean less gas for us to drive our cars with and that greenhouse gases will get worse. "I have my 15 mpg car and lifestyle and I don't want it affected by a half a billion Indians getting a 50 mpg car and burning my gas, and they'd be fouling the environment to boot!" Maybe Bill Cosby was on to something.
In the last two years Cosby has criticized the Black community for spending too much money on shoes and cars and bling and not enough on education. He has taken some heat for this. It seems to me that it isn't just Black Americans, but most Americans, regardless of race, that spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to keep up with the Jones. Think of the images we see today. TV is ripe with people sitting in coffee shops talking about nothing in labeled clothing watching others pimp their ride while bridezillas try to outdo each other and complain when their house isn't priced to sell soon enough so they can move into their dream house before they are 30 and hope Hank Hill doesn't move next door.
This is a long roundabout way of asking, What gives you worth and value? Is it things, or is it what you do with your time? Might it be how much you serve your fellow humans, helping them? Didn't someone say, It is better to give than to receive.