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Monday, February 14, 2011

The Language of Love

Hello Romeo.

Today is your big day - St. Valentine's Day. By 10am your heart will nearly pop from the pressure, if you happen to remember today is the day you should feel pressured to make a big show, as television, radio, print and Internet media have reminded you at every opportunity for three weeks now. Yesterday's intense, last minute advertising campaigns even drove you from your Sunday sofa sanctuary.

It's amazing how we humans can be cajoled into contorted guilt.

Consider the phenomenon of Global Warming, a self-created future of swimming in boiling oceans while dead polar bears float by in the surf. But Global Warming has not turned out quite as predicted, what with one of the coldest winters in decades having descended upon us. So now, instead of talking about Global Warming, we're faced with Climate Change.

Bottom Line: We still must feel guilty for being human and acting on that innately human desire to control our environment and make it suit our needs, thus accusedly wreaking havoc on our world's delicate balance. We'll be the first generation in the thousands of years that hominids have occupied the planet to up-end it from its axis.

How do these semantics relate to Valentine's Day? Well, Hallmark has taken a tip of the hat from the go-green camp. The folks at the greeting card dynasty understand the anxiety a day set aside for love, and love alone, causes the male gender. They know this is the most dreaded holiday among men; a holiday filled with expectations they can never possibly meet. So Hallmark is getting their attention with a new slogan: It's not I love you, it's I love us.

Bottom Line: You still have to feel guilty for being human ; for the inability to muster compulsory romance or even remember that some spectacularly meaningful statement of your love is mandatory today.

Global Warming/Climate Change. I love you/I love us. Potato/po-tah-to. Tomato/to-mah-to. Don't you wish you could call the whole thing off?

4 comments:

G Derry said...

Well said. Why wait for one day of the year, when you could apply this guilt on daily basis. For me, it's not the big things, it's the millions of little things that really count. Hallmark has yet to review or approve that statement.

Unknown said...

Well said, Greg. Well said.

Bill Jopling said...

Why'd you get up so early to discourse about V'Day?

Unknown said...

Cupid makes me crazy like that, Bill.