That Would Make Sense

At work today, I was stocking shelves over in the toys department. Sally, a tiny woman who looks to be forty-ish, was the only other one in the area. We were finishing up there, and over in the adjacent sporting goods section, a couple of small children were running around, babbling loudly. Sally remarked that she remembered when her kids were that little. I replied that a number of people had told me that they couldn't picture me as a little kid, that I must have just appeared somewhere as a teenager. Mom tells me that I was like an old person, even when I was very young. I doubt it's what she was referring to, but I was certainly advanced, particularly with words. I could read before I started school, and was reading at a high school level in second grade. Thing about that is, the school I attended was Clermont Northeastern, a place which does not exactly represent the pinnacle of standards in education to begin with. Naturally, they didn't know what to do with someone like me. In the early grades, work was assigned for the coming week on Monday, to be completed by the end of the day Friday. I would finish my work on Tuesday or Wednesday, and spend the rest of the week doing reading of my choice. Or at least, that's what I wanted to do. CNE, being CNE, decided that the best thing to do with a smart kid who was eager to be intellectually stimulated was to punish him. What, was that intimidating or something? Have there never been gifted students before? Is this the nineteenth century? Why have we not figured this shit out yet?! And believe me, it's still going on. There is no celebration of individuality or of actual intelligence. They just want you to pass their standardized tests, and then they dump you out into the real world with not a clue what to do once you're there. Aw, hell, ain't that what college is for? Right, but we're not prepared for that either, so if we do go to college and get that $50,000 piece of paper that reads, "Yay, you bought a piece of paper!", we spend that four-plus years just catching up, and by the time the university spits us out, we missed all that stuff that was supposed to help us. But I digress.

Back at CNE, I wasn't allowed to read my books, and I was discouraged from doing anything not school-approved (that is, anything that I thought of on my own was no good at all). So, I got to be bored, and I started acting out because what the hell else was there to do? And then I got punished for that too, and now everybody wonders why Ryan has no ambition? Maybe it's because anytime I ever tried to do anything I wanted to do, somebody rapped my knuckles with the proverbial ruler. Really makes a guy feel like he just can't do anything right, so why try? I'm not saying that's right, and it's not an excuse or anything, it was just something that occurred to me. So, thanks for psychologically crippling me, CNE! But also, thanks for convincing me that what I really needed was a college education, so that I could be one of millions of college graduates who can't get a real job because the job market is so saturated with people just like me, who blew thousands of dollars to get that degree that was supposed to land us the big bucks at some indefinite place down the line...but the system just can't support that, and we need to face that reality. Otherwise, we spend our lives convincing ourselves that all kids are equal when they're not, so that all young adults believe that they're equal to all other young adults, when they're not, so they all go and get those pricey pieces of paper, and most of them will no longer earn enough more in a lifetime than a non-college graduate to justify the cost (that's true, go look it up). Yes, it's a great education system we've got here.

In other news...actually, I guess it's the big headline today...the health care thing passed. I'm actually surprised that even that relatively weak bill managed to get through in this country. It's...well, I guess it's progress, or something. I mean, it is a step in the right direction, though I still think that what we really need to do is scrap the whole system and have the government pay for everybody's health care. I mean, why does everything in this fucking country have to make money? Shouldn't access to health care be one of those things that's for the public good? Instead of having everybody essentially gambling, putting money into something with no guarantee that they will get the equivalent back in health care, why don't we all just pay towards it in our taxes relative to how much we make, and that goes to pay the doctors and provide the medicine and procedures as needed? Yeah, that's socialism, but so goddamn what? It's fair, and it makes sense! Why does that scare everyone so much? But the worst thing about the bill we've got now is that it penalizes people for not having health insurance. Hey, quick question here. Anybody have any idea what the number one reason is that people don't have health insurance now? Because they don't have enough money to pay for it! So we're going to fine them? Oh yes, that makes sense. Let's fine the people who don't have any money. Then we can have debtor prisons again, because we're not already wasting enough money imprisoning people on harmless drug charges. You see how everything ties together like that? Maybe we'll get all this stuff right eventually...but probably not.

We have a saying down at Target: "You know what the most commonly uttered phrase is among Target employees? 'That would make sense.'" Think about it.