I just heard another ad from a car dealership offering a “stimulus package” for their 09 model cars and all the hair on the back of my neck went up.  Am I the only one that thinks this term is being over used?

Tossing a saddle on the current economic crisis as a way to increase your sagging sales seems a just a bit ghoulish and predatory to me.  How about you come up with a creative campaign that takes the high road?

While we’re on the subject of a stimulus program, here are a few suggestions for a personal stimulus program.

• Turn off the television, put down the remote, and get out there in the real world for an evening or two.  There are a lot of people that could use your help right now, even if it’s just a few minutes of your time spent listening.
• Start every conversation with a positive story or suggestion for improvement.  Almost everyone I run into or overhear is too quick to complain about the state of the economy or the cutbacks at work.  It’s very easy to forget just how blessed most of us really are.
• Start thinking about what you can do to help the people who are important to you succeed, and stop looking at the list of public entitlements like it’s the menu at an all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant.

Somehow we’ve been duped into thinking that the way to solve our cultural and economic issues is to spend money and look to others for help.  A real stimulus program starts with an individual effort to make the world a better place.  Like it says up at the top right of this blog: share, collaborate, benefit!

Each time I hear another huckster offering up price reductions to clear their bloated inventory, or touting tired, already questionable productivity promises as a return on investment for the purchase of their hugely profitable products, and then draping all of this in the trappings of a stimulus package, I fear that our economic crisis is largely based not on financial difficulties but the possibility that a large segment of society has become morally bankrupt.

What is your personal stimulus program?