Are Things Really This Bad?

This might end up being a double post. Fittingly, Blogger had some sort of meltdown recently that deleted this post the first time I put it up. By the headline alone I'm sure you can start to see why it's fitting that it got messed up.

Here's the rest.

My quiet friend Brian was once asked by a frustrated fellow high-school student, "How come you never talk?!"

Brian replied, "What's there to say?"

I've been described as negative by a tremendous number of people.

I reply, "What's there to be positive about?"

Am I alone in the feeling that things have been going from bad to worse in just about every way in the world? Are things as bad as they seem to me, or is it my ugly negativity?

There are no heroes in government right now, and barely a handful of people even worth talking about. Most of my heroes are from the private sector, and they're dead.

There are heroes, though: SEAL Team Six, and the people who helped them find Osama bin Laden, right?

The SEALs, certainly; but the CIA? How much could a semi-knowledgeable person celebrate that sinister organization? Does this victory nullify its many tremendous defeats and injustices?

But am I alone in being troubled by just how jubilantly people were celebrating bin Laden's death? Didn't it reek of overcompensation, like when Bill Murray was disturbingly overdoing it during the snowball fight in Groundhog Day? 

I live in a country that was so starved to celebrate anything at all that some of its citizens took to the streets, chanting and repeating that three-lyric wonder, "U.S.A.!" upon the news that some SEALs had killed the man behind the attack that pierced the hull of the nation. 

I would loudly join them in the streets if I knew his death also meant the death of his ideas. But it doesn't, so I am only satisfied that there is one less murderous animal out there, and I am particularly glad it is this one. 

Which is where I join the chorus of those who are frustrated to find our military fighting wars in three countries except the one that was housing the man who had actually attacked America.

Things appear to be so absurdly Orwellian right now that it's almost something you can't talking about—like the question, "Why do you think we're really here?" It's so big that you can't bring it up without looking stupid.

But it's right where we appear to find ourselves. Our Congress is generating profound debt, and clapping themselves on the back over it, and yet my idiotic fellow Americans continue this ugly cycle: "Ninety percent of Americans want all of Congress fired and replaced—except, of course, for their district's representative."

War. Debt. Security over Liberty.

 

Two trillion dollars were created and distributed, and we're not allowed to know where a lot of it went. The biggest robbery in the history of civilization, and it's another thing that's so big we're not allowed to talk about it, because we know it's there but we don't have a handle on it.

I mean, I know they didn't steal my money. All they did was make my money worth a lot less, while they compensated for the devaluation by sheer quantity rewarded.

Too big to talk about. Why are we really here?

Are things really this bad?

What's the difference between President Obama and President Bush? That's not the setup to a joke; that's a legitimate question, and the answer appears to be, and I'm putting this in quotes because that's where it belongs, "ObamaCare."

Our country is underwater, and we're dying of thirst. We've got millions of homeless people and millions of empty homes.

If the differences between George W. Bush and Barack Obama are as marginal as they appear, then does the President really make any decisions at all, or was Bill Hicks right?

Am I being negative, or am I reacting to what's out there?

And yet here is a bolt of positivity:

I am starting a company. I am bringing stories and ideas to the world.

Why can't negativity be a fuel?

Another Great Depression

My friend Jaime Long recently tweeted:

 

"Study up kids, you don't want to miss out on one of those jobs where you pretend to work & waste your life in front of a computer all day."

 

I could look it up, or you could, but either way there's not going to be any research presented here, so you'll just have to trust me that I've both heard and read about studies that found that college students barely learn anything in their first two years at university.

 

The results of those studies led to my looking back on my own experiences in those two years of my life, and my results were the same: I did learn a few key things, but nothing that was so massive it could not have been absorbed in the much more illuminating subsequent two years.

 

And by "much more illuminating" I mean the difference between a pitch-black basketball arena and a lit candle on center court.

 

That candlelight cost me and my parents approximately $50,000.

 

There is such a strong emphasis on getting a college education in this country, and I think that is misguided. America needs more people with tangible skills, like the ability to build or farm or somehow Create Value. A college degree does not Value create. Mine was a huge waste of time, actually, where I learned important academic and life lessons, but what made it a waste of time was that it was one or two years' worth of life and academic lessons that were stretched over four or five years, with the huge gaps filled in by a confusing orgy of partying.

 

What were we celebrating?

 

We were filling time in the funnest way available.

 

Can we afford to fill time anymore? Can we afford to continue to squander money and minds on sociology degrees? Isn't every human on earth already a sociologist by virtue of the necessity of paying attention to what people around them are doing? And that's just one of the expensive programs that leads to nothing.

 

I studied journalism at what I was told was one of the better journalism programs in America. When I graduated, I got as far away from journalism as possible.

 

It cost me and my parents $50,000 for me to realize I didn't want to be a journalist—that I'd only signed up for the program because I wanted to learn the disciplines involved: editing, proofreading, interviewing, layout/design, concision writing, etc.

 

I could have learned all those things within two years, even with partying on the weekends, as opposed to Wednesday through Sunday. There is a tremendous bulk built into most schools' requirements, and I have to think it's a money-generating thing for the schools, and again I have to defer to the marketplace: if the price in time and money continues to rise past the point where it makes economic sense for most Americans, then we need to stop feeding the leviathan, because the government is all too happy to have us owe them bigger and bigger debts. Those debts come with interest, and they're trying to make money, too. Plus, it's easier to control our lives, if necessary, that way—by having us indebted to them.

 

If I had a child who only had a marginal interest in going to college, I would encourage him or her to seek any career path in the world—not just the ones for which a college degree is necessary. My friend is a plumber, and he makes a good living in Cleveland, Ohio, in one of the worst places in one of the worst economies in world history. He didn't go to college, but people always need help with their plumbing.

 

That's actual value. That's tangible and useful.

 

We are pointlessly generating debt. Our employers need to start looking past degrees and into what really matters: the functioning of the individual's mind. Having gone to college, I am not impresed by college graduates. It's easier than high school, and seemingly the only graduation requirement is that you don't drink yourself to death.

 

And then at the end you get one of those jobs where you pretend to work and waste your life in front of a computer all day.

 

Another Great Depression, indeed.

Email to Bill Simmons

I just submitted this email to Bill Simmons' contact page on ESPN.com. I'm posting it here because I wholeheartedly agree with me.





Sports Guy,

Follow my logic.

The playoffs—NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL—are the best because they're elimination tournaments, which create drama, which make everyone try harder (play defense).

Count me among those who would prefer to turn baseball, basketball, and hockey "regular seasons" into a large number of short, seeded, sponsored tournaments.

Each player in the league would get some sort of acceptable minimum wage, and the incentives would be in the accumulation of tournament wins and rankings. (The top-ranked players would have higher-paying incentives.)

You could still have an ultimate playoff at the end of the year, but this way it's not just a marathon of drinking and looking at people play a sport like they're sawing wood.

I don't think you'd need to mess with NFL seasons, though. That whole system is perfect for that sport.

But college football needs the closure of an elimination tournament.

If you think about it, a tournament is an automatic three-act structure, where victory always wins.

It's also a sort of inverted bowel movement, where the pooh is champions.

It's life, man!

Andohbytheway, doesn't the NFL lockout kind of remind you of the WGA strike? In seemingly arbitrarily looking for more money, owners and writers decided to throw a tantrum because they couldn't have it the way they wanted.

Speaking of The Wire, I get anxious sometimes, and I ask myself what Marlo would do.

Danimal
@gonefiction