I’m grateful Lisa Williams set up a PayPal account for donations to help Jay McCarthy and his family recover from the fire at their home yesterday. I’m sorry for their tragedy but glad everyone in his family was okay.
After I read Jay’s post describing the fire, yesterday afternoon, I drove to the grocery store and made the mistake of turning on the radio in the van. I think I should stop listening to commercial radio. Perhaps it was me. With the topics of life and loss on my mind, I was feeling intense and sensitive.
A commercial for AAA came on the air. It was supposed to be funny. It was supposed to be about friendship. In the ad, one friend offers to another that if his car breaks down, he’ll pick him up. But then, this friend makes multiple excuses why he isn’t available…most of the time. AAA then emphasizes that friends aren’t reliable. Friends are flaky. So buy AAA for those tough times.
In the mood I was feeling, this commercial made me mad. What is friendship if you can’t call me in the middle of the night and ask me to pick you up when your car breaks down? What is friendship if it isn’t during the tough times? What are friends for? Is it money that makes a relationship?
Today I saw the premise behind this commercial proven wrong in blogs. Looking on Feedster and reading through my aggregator through the day, I’ve seen people who know Jay in person and people who have only exchanged links with him gather around him in his need and tell him that they are his friends, people expressing sympathies, people asking Dude, Jay, how else can we help?
1 response so far ↓
1 Rod Kratochwill's Weblog // May 25, 2004 at 10:23 am
What friends are for
Julie talks about ” What friends are for ” and I am forced to think about how important it has been that our friends truely are those friends that you could call in the middle of the night for help.