Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Kids gotta learn!


Ha ha ha! Okay, okay. Settle down, kids. I can tell by your reactions in this video that some of you are confused that anyone could have a problem with something so simple and harmless and I think I know why: obviously, you children are too young and unsophisticated to understand that many adults, those people who are older than you and are entrusted with your safety and well-being, simply don't have it together. I know this is unpleasant to hear, being as you rely on these people for basic things like food and shelter and not catching polio.
Ouch, huh? Yeah, I know.

But the sad fact is, when you really boil it down to the very essence, precious few of us grown-ups are actually anywhere near as smart as we think we are. Allow me to explain.

What many of us have done as we've grown older and matured is acquired bad habits as a result of irrational fears and a reluctance to accept responsibility for the consequences of our actions. For many of us, this is what we refer to as "knowledge". As a result, we ignore our natural instincts, as well as common sense and book learnin', and rely on this "knowledge" to guide our decisions instead. For example, in the case of race relations, we ignore the natural instinct to judge individuals as threats or allies based on their actual behavior and treatment of us in favor of our "knowledge" that Other People (in this case, those with different skin color) are inherently bad. We acquire this "knowledge" from various sources. Maybe our friends or relatives or other people we trust have told us about their bad experiences dealing with these Other People. Maybe we made some bad choices and blame our resultant misfortune in life on the Other People, which is far easier than taking responsibility for it. It's all part of acquiring "knowledge"!

I can see you're still kind of confused by all of this. That's okay; you just haven't acquired that much "knowledge" yet. At this point, you might be asking, "well, why are you jerks still in charge, being as you've abandoned basic common sense in favor of nonsensical panic reactions when it comes to making decisions?" Well, that's just the way it is and it's going to stay that way, all right? We have lawyers, guns and money. You don't want to mess with us.

Let's stay focused, shall we? Now, there's a reason I keep putting the word "knowledge" in quotes and why I say this is the case for many, but not all, of us. And that's because it doesn't apply to ALL adults. Some of us DO have actual knowledge and apply it to problems we face in our daily lives in attempts to improve ourselves and the world around us. The rest of everybody are dumbasses. And while ALL of us acknowledge the existence of dumbasses everywhere, all over the place, all of the damn time, NONE of us believe that we might be one of them. In other words, none of us are very good at math.

This presents a challenge for you as children: figuring out which of us you should actually pay attention to and learn from and which of us are just dumbasses to be avoided. I wish I could be more of a help here, but after watching this video, I really only have three pieces of advice to guide you:

  1. The more someone presents themselves as being smarter than anyone else, the less likely that is to be true. If you encounter an adult who says they have all the answers, I promise you that person is a guaranteed dumbass. Run fast in the opposite direction when you come across these people. Don't stop until you find someone whose favorite scent is not that of their own farts. This may take a while so you may have to run far. Good thing you're eating Cheerios to help stay in shape. Good for you! 
  2. Trust your instincts until you have a reason not to. You're already pre-loaded with some pretty good ideas about what is good or bad. If you rely on just those and nothing else, you're probably going to turn out okay. There will be exceptions and those exceptions will probably result in you getting hurt a couple of times but the trade-off there is you'll be compensated with actual first-hand life knowledge insteadd of second-hand dumbass "knowledge"
  3.  Cheerios taste pretty terrible. Regular Cheerios, anyway. The Honey Nut kind is pretty good.

1 comment:

Clare said...

And every so often, all the separate and individual dumbasses get together to make bigger dumbasses so they can follow them around and talk about whether they are big dumbasses or the biggest dumbasses ever. These bigger dumbasses have names like "the Kardashians" or the "National Hockey League" or "Congress."