So, I’m back. Happy New Year.
I’m old. My friends older than me insist that I’m not old but no one objectively accuses me of being young. The thing about being old is years all start looking suspiciously like each other. Decades look a bit different but years look like carbon copies.
The other problem is you are the only one that remembers what a carbon copy is.
I’d recommend against getting old except for the fact that it beats the heck out of staying young. Oh, you miss things like functional knees but the ability to say whatever you want because neither your mom nor your boss are gonna complain more than makes up for it.
Also you are better educated than anything twenty years your junior. I can out math and out spell all them young ‘uns and I stunk at BOTH in school.
We probably need to fix that. A couple more generations like this and getting a man to the corner store without Google will be a bigger accomplishment than getting one on the Moon.
Oh, don’t get too upset. Half the problem this country is facing is two generations now allowed to vote that think nothing is important until it is a crisis. The result is that they freak out over something that might happen in a hundred years because the media tells them it’s a ‘crisis’ but all that boring stuff that they can actually do something about they ignore because no one has told them it was a crisis.
Millennials are beginning to notice that their kids not only can’t get jobs, they can’t navigate a block. In time honored and just as stupid as their parents manner, they are panicking and decrying the ‘education crisis’ and ‘iPad kids’. Who still uses iPads anyway? Anywho, their little latchkey backsides will over react and ‘solve’ the problem, probably with homeschooling and playing Tiger Mom.
Like I said, all these ‘changes’ start looking a lot like last year’s model.
You don’t know what a ‘last year’s model’ is, do you? Whippersnapper.
Just a thought, but maybe if we put more thought into the original policy we’d spend less time fixing the latest mess that isn’t really a crisis but we’re doing the headless chicken dance about it anyway.
Let me help you iPad moms out a bit. It’s a hardware problem, not a software problem. No toddler needs ‘screen time’. They need Mom and Dad time. If you’re too tired to handle that, time to reassess either the job or the lifestyle. Do that now before you lose the best part of being a parent – the little monster loves the heck out of you. They grow out of that way too fast.
Yeah, yeah, eventually they need to learn to navigate the computer. First off, not all computers need to be connected to the Internet, capisce? Second, the kid may be a software wiz, but you have the physical password key. Hardware for the win.
This is why your tax dollars pay for one poor Marine to chase the President around carrying the guy’s luggage. The President needs physical access to the necessary codes before he can nuke anything. Expensive, yes, but it beats the heck out of some little teenaged twerp pulling a 21st century version of “War Games”.
You don’t know what “War Games” was, either? You do realize you literally have a ginormous university in your pocket, right?
It’s gonna be easier to provide a link than to get you to look up an Eighties movie, isn’t it? Sheesh, don’t be complaining when the kid trying to fix the robot that takes your Mickey D’s order can’t figure out that he needs to plug it in.
We Boomers were supposed to be the ones with the non-existent attention span and TV rotted brains. Our parents thought we were idiots and they weren’t completely wrong. Now, our grandkids make us look like geniuses. Yep, we definitely need to fix this one.
It’s not a crisis; it’s a problem. One of many that you as a grown citizen of the United States will make decisions about how we solve. You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that that boring voting stuff isn’t important and then grab your poster to run protest over the Crisis of the Week. You can, but here’s an alternative: chill, think and then act.
On the bright side, you’ll kill fewer trees and fill the landfills a tad slower by not using so danged much poster board. Nah, it’s not nearly as much fun as getting your panties in a wad over whatever the media is on about today, but it’s a danged site more effective.
Not efficient – efficiency is not what you want in government. An efficient government can strip you of your rights before you know what happened. What you want is effective governance. Big words, but a simple idea: run the place well.
In case you missed it, that means you. This whole ‘government by the people’ thing means that the people actually have to govern their government. For the large word challenged, that means you have to do the job. Not you general but you personally. Get informed, get involved and get going – or quit complaining that ‘they’ aren’t doing whatever you think ‘they’ are supposed to do. They is YOU.
There’s no magic formula. People only come in size human and that means they WILL mess up, more often than we’d like to admit, on purpose. Remember, this includes you. Be charitable but not stupid. The stick you poke others with will be used to poke you – sharp or soft, you choose.
But, but, that’s so HARD!
Nah, that’s grown up. It’s pretty easy and can be a total blast as long as you get ahead of the job. If you wait until things really are a crisis, it’ll be like being run over with a steamroller.
Oh for pity’s sake! Don’t they teach you ANYTHING in school anymore? Look it up!
Back? Good. See, grown up isn’t so hard. You looked it up all by yourself and now you know what a steamroller is and why you don’t want to get run over by one.
Look, you can do one of three things: lead, follow or get run over. If a better world than the one you were born into is your goal, pick Option 1 or find a good leader you can trust and go with Option 2. Option 3 is what happens when life happens to you instead of you living life.
Wait? Living life sounds fun. Making a better world sounds tough.
They’re the same thing unless you like being a pancake. Life is what happens every instant you’re alive, not merely what happens on vacation. If you wait to live you’ll miss out. If you think vacation is all there is to living, you’ll miss all the best bits. Being the person you can be, not just the one you want to be or should be, that’s really living.
Being the jerk who is the only attendee of his own funeral is not the goal. Being that guy that people trust and count on, that’s the guy who leaves the world better than he found it.
He’s also the guy folks want to go on vacation with. No one said grown ups don’t get to have fun, too.
Real solutions aren’t found in textbooks. If it were that easy, we’d have created a perfect world already. Real solutions are found when we take the responsibility and mess up a few dozen times. Grown up is fun but size human hurts a bit.
Only the Great Potter made perfection the first try. You aren’t Him. Neither are we. Us human types have to get our hands dirty and make a bunch of lopsided bowls before we get one right. Government by the People is no different. On the bright side, we get to learn from our ancestors more insane mistakes – if we will. On the not so bright side, our kids get to laugh at all the stupid stuff we’re doing.
The technical political term is ‘muddling through’. You think I made that up, don’t you? Nope, that’s the real term – go look… Already looking? Good deal! See, told you it was the real term.
Muddling through doesn’t sound romantic because it’s not. Certainly not efficient and often not all that much fun, but danged effective. Ten thousand ways to not make a light bulb gets Edison ten thousand steps closer to the right one.
So what do you want to do? Lead, follow or be a pancake? Live life or be run over by it? Govern your government or let idiots govern you? Be a grown up or a perpetual snot nosed do nothing?
Make the world a better place or let others ruin it? You choose. Next year will look a lot like this one. But how it will find you, that’s entirely up to you.
Hurry up, we’ve got a world to fix!
