It’s not like I’ve never known pain before. I’ve had a root canal. I’ve had a broken jaw. I’ve been to an L.A. Clippers game.
But I didn’t know what pain was until I went shopping for shoes with my teen-age son.
If you don’t understand why this was such an ordeal, well, obviously, you’ve never done it. You’re operating under the delusion that “shoes” are those things you wear to cover your feet. Silly person. For a 15-year-old boy, “shoes” are those things you wear to define your entire earthly existence. Show up in school with the wrong shoes? Might as well get caught listening to a CD that doesn’t carry a parental advisory sticker.
We’re talking a fatal faux pas.
That’s why buying shoes for this particular boy required five trips to the store five! I’m begging him to pick a shoe any shoe that won’t require me to take out a second mortgage and let’s please get home before the polar ice cap melts. But he won’t be rushed. Instead, he’s pacing grimly in front of the shoe rack like Kennedy paced the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Except, of course, Kennedy’s dilemma wasn’t as serious.
So there we stand. Me fuming, him cogitating, trying to divine which shoe will impart the maximum amount of cool. From time to time, a gleam of hopeful madness lights his eyes and he holds up some futuristic objects made of plastic and metal that look like something you might wear to play basketball on the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise. They’ve got everything but a digital readout.
Not that I care. I’d be happy to unlimber the credit card and buy the things, but invariably, there dangles a price tag that reads like an area code. Next thing I know, someone is helping me up off the floor. I tell him no and the hopeful madness dissolves to disgusted muttering. Something about the Jaws of Life and opening my wallet.
Cheap? Moi? No way. I wouldn’t mind paying a week’s salary for athletic shoes if I thought I was rearing the next Michael Jordan. Or even the next Dirk Nowitzki. But this kid couldn’t care less about sports. Baseball? No, thanks. Football? Not interested. Basketball? He thinks Shaq is something you wind up in if you don’t pay your rent.
Yet he needs these shoes like air. And you can only salute mass media for the sheer perfection of the con job they’ve pulled.
I’m reminded of something that happened the other day in the high school journalism class I teach. One of the kids brought in a newspaper story about Cristal, the $500-a-bottle champagne that has become all the rage among hip-hop fans as a result of having been mentioned in numerous rap songs. Suddenly, nightclubs in the gritty part of town are selling a rich man’s libation to men who may or may not know where next week’s rent money is coming from.
As a fellow who calls himself Black Rob told the reporter, “I bet if I come out tomorrow saying that I’m drinking water, everyone will start drinking water. The influence is just crazy.”
Notwithstanding that water has been pretty popular for billions of years without an endorsement from Black Rob, the man has a point. And some of the kids were offended at the idea they might be manipulated so easily.
I saw a teachable moment, and I took it. Think, I told them. If you believe a certain thing is so, ask yourself why. Is this truly what you feel? Or is it simply what you’ve been programmed to feel, made to feel, by the mass media machine?
Where does the machine end and you begin? Who are you? And what do you think?
Unfortunately, that speech worked better with my students than with my son. They nodded thoughtfully, he just held up another pair of space objects. Eventually, he found some he liked. He borrowed money to make up the difference that his cheapskate father wouldn’t pay and left the store wearing a great big grin.
Been strutting proudly ever since. He thinks he’s cooler now than he ever was before.
Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
