thinking for yourself: thrift shop wisdom

"This is what I call getting swindled and pimped...this is what I call getting tricked by business."  - Macklemore, Thrift Shop

Maybe because my husband is a salesman and his territory has been the Midwest, we are naturally a road trip family.  One of the great accomplishments of my life was driving as the lone adult from St. Louis to Southern Florida with my four and six year old children.  Happily, they each threw up only once. 

This past week, we enjoyed a vomit-free road trip to Northern Minnesota. Being a bit older, the kids like listening to pop music while we drive and you can't listen to a pop station right now without hearing Macklemore's Thrift Shop  (Clean version!).  The poet in me is predisposed to like rap and hip hop and I actually think this is a great, fun song.  The thing I like best about it, is that it's really pretty subversive...the 'speaker' is basically saying that if you're buying a Gucci T-shirt for $50, when instead you could go to a thrift shop and purchase something totally unique for half the price, then you're getting tricked by business. 

Why is this subversive?  Because it asks us to question who gives us our version of reality.  It expects that even little kids who are listening to pop songs can question why and how we want what we think we want. 

We can and should do this in many areas of our life, because there is always someone else's idea of truth or reality that can influence us for better, for worse, or for neutral - but if we are not aware of it, we lose our power of choice.

A small example, maybe a silly one, from my own life, is the influence of my grandmother - my mother's mother.  She lived to be 95 years old and was a lady who enjoyed people, enjoyed life in general, played and won bridge games well into her nineties, and read the newspaper up until the last months of her life. She said the key to longevity is a sense of humor and faith in God.  She also was a lady who 'put her face on.'  I remember visiting her in the hospital when I was in my mid to late twenties. (As many older people, she had somewhat frequent hospitalizations in the last few years of her life).  I walked in, smile on my face, bringing youth and cheer with me and she looked at me and said, "Kate, you look terrible."  Huh?  I noticed she had just put on her lipstick.  I myself was not wearing any lipstick.  This is why she thought I looked terrible.  In my grandmother's version of reality, it was a truth that all women look better with a little makeup.  It brightens their cheeks and shows they have pride in themselves.

It was like the air I breathed growing up: "women should wear makeup."   I can't say this is as malevolent as 'getting tricked by business', but as an adult, I see that there is no objective law of nature stating the above.  While, I am still a makeup-wearer,   I have the responsibility to look at who and what has influenced me and then decide what I want to keep and what I want to get rid of, or where I want to fall in-between.  (Lipstick: only on dress up occasions.  Mascara: everyday.) 

Another example - there was just a editorial in the New York Times this week http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/unhappy-clean-house.html?_r=0 about how and why we've come to see the perfection of our homes as a means to happiness.  How did this get prescribed to us?

Here's the upshot:  we've got parents, friends, schools, business, religion competing with one another and sometimes overlapping in their efforts to influence the way we live or what we think about the way we live.  I find that some people I meet are not happy with their lives in part because they are so frazzled trying to live up to someone else's standard. 

It seems to me that Macklemore is doing and saying something right.  Let's use a little common sense.  Let's adopt a little of his swagger.  When you're wearing flannel zebra jammies, you just have to think for yourself.