S&R

Please hold as I gather my thoughts.

Alright, this is about that membership shopping that I was wanting to write about. What prodded me to write this was the overwhelming feeling of being inside a warehouse full of expensive shit made "affordable" just so we could taste the American way of life. I may be overacting here but that's what I really felt, up until now.

Back in the day when I was a wee little lad in a catholic elementary school, they always told us to be proud nationalists. Patriot, I thought, was a word that the Americans often use to portray their fervor for keeping true to the red white and blue. Who wouldn't want that, right? It's the green, green grass of future homes. They taught us how to show nationalism, how to support local products, how to keep our belief systems in line with what our ancestry tells us. It's good thing to learn at school but something never really explained the idea of wanting the American way of things.

As you enter the warehouse, you'll be quite amazed at how it resembles a plane hangar. You can imagine how Boeings and fighter jets sit on the grounds, instead, there are high rise isles of product and imported fantasies. I may be drawing from my past media studies lessons or popular culture modules but something rang. Chocolates, with their out-from-the-balikbayan-box musk are lined up in varying conditions of flavor, packaging and certain sweetness and richness of the cacao that was used to supply us the sugar rush of fine edible gold. I wasn't sure how I would react at first, everything was just so big. It felt like I was back in grade school when I felt small if compared to a white dude thousands of miles away. Everything was blown up into a ratio of a heavy set viking: not slices of pizza but overstuffed banners of meat, sauce and bread, bags of chips fit for a whole barkada but is good enough for a single sitting of a season of The Walking Dead.

I got a buzz out of it, though. The liquor section offered a tempting bottle of fine whiskey. It's somehow a doublestandard for me since I was questioning everything ever since I walked in. The queue to the register just equally ridiculous as well. Carts and carts full of product are lined up, you'd probably think they were buying for a mini-grocery store. 

Everyone was just sold with the idea that we get to be fancy and Americanized if we buy this or that. I'm not mad at Americans for selling that idea, it's part of the consumer-capitalist relationship/theory/principle/way of life that we all know, love, live, die and kill for. We are sold this message because this is what their marketing research team had found out with all the surveys, interviews and studies they put out. What hurts the most is that we truly enjoy it. We get the idea that a certain product has this amount of verifiable and quantifiable amount of utils that we'd gladly buy twice the amount of what we need just because the tag says "save as much as up to xx-amount of Dollars!" (which is something that adds to the problem since we don't even use $$ for our daily commute and alms for the poor.)

I don't know if I should be offended by that or I should accept it as marketing hype. Slowly, we identify the brands we want to be identified with and the flags that we represent. So, we really shouldn't be so mad when they criticize the country and our heritage since we really don't have brown skin anymore, plus, we rep the star spangled banner, they have good deals at the local flag store.

I am almost reminded that we are indeed "global citizens."