Rules for Life

These rules for life come from Charles J. Sykes, author of the book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, Or Add. In emails they are often incorrectly attributed to Bill Gates or Kurt Vonnegut — though they don’t sound like anything either of them would ever say.

Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase “It’s not fair” 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.

Rule No. 2: The real world won’t care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it’s not fair. (See Rule No. 1)

Rule No. 3: Sorry, you won’t make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won’t be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn’t have a Gap label.

Rule No. 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait 'til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he’s not going to ask you how you feel about it.

Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren’t embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.

Rule No. 6: It’s not your parents' fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of “It’s my life,” and “You’re not the boss of me,” and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it’s on your dime. Don’t whine about it, or you’ll sound like a baby boomer.

Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents' generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.

Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t. In some schools, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone’s feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.)

Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don’t get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don’t get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we’re at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realization. (See Rule No. 1 and Rule No. 2.)

Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.

Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.

Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you’re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for “expressing yourself” with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You’re welcome.

Moonbats with BDS

Are you familiar with Democrats.com? It’s one of the top two or three liberal sites on the web, along with MoveOn and DailyKos. For anyone with a libertarian or conservative mindset, a visit to these sites is like a visit to a lunatic asylum. Rarely do you see any well-reasoned arguments or interesting debates; mainly these are places where liberals go to rant and rave, and to share fevered and fantastic delusions. Every time I visit one of these sites, I come away worried about the future of mankind — and I mean that quite seriously. My fear stems from the apparent fact that people who “reason” like the ones posting on these sites appear to be in the ascendancy in the Democratic Party — one of the two great political parties of this nation. And the leaders of that party don’t seem to be far removed from this crowd (think Howard Dean).

What does that say about our future? I have trouble coming up with any likely good consequences. Mostly, it’s just scary.

If you accuse me of overreacting, I offer you this example, spotted in a visit this morning:

From Democrats.com:

Is Rove Planning a Terror Attack on the Super Bowl?

Submitted by Bob Fertik on February 3, 2006

The White House is being way too quiet today, and the silence is eerie.

Sure, Bush is on the road talking about “competitiveness.” But he might as well be talking about Mah Jong for all anyone cares.

Bad things happen when Bush is babbling about things he cares nothing about - sometimes very bad things.

Remember 9/11? That morning, Bush was babbling about education in a Florida classroom, as if Mr. “Is Our Children Learning?” gave a crap. He learned about the first plane crashing into the WTC at 8:46 a.m. - he twice said he saw it live, which of course no one else did - yet at 9:00 a.m. he walked right into the classroom as scheduled. And right after the second plane hit at 9:05 a.m. - which everyone except Bush saw live on TV - Andy Card whispered in Bush’s ear that “America is under attack.” Yet Bush didn’t flinch; he just kept reading “My Pet Goat” with the kids for another 10-20 minutes. He then gave a horrible TV statement and flew as far from Washington as he could. But a few days later, Karl Rove put him before the cameras with rescue workers on Ground Zero, put a bullhorn in his hand, and instantly transformed him from a clueless coward to a “hero."

...

But security preparations for this Super Bowl are getting a lot less media coverage than the last 3 did.

Which leads me to ask: is Karl Rove planning a terrorist attack during the Super Bowl, in order to set the stage for building towards war with Iran over the coming year?

...

If Rove wants a war with Iran, he will have to manufacture it, because Iran (like Iraq in 2002) is not trying to provoke a war.

And how better to manufacture a war than to manufacture a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl right while the whole world is watching - and blame it on Iran?

Of course, Rove will have to be very creative this time, beyond even painting a U.S. plane in the colors of the U.N. (Perhaps a “Canadian” submarine will float up the Detroit River? Watch it live!) The FBI is prepared for just about anything - Special Agent William Kowalski says “there are no credible threats against the Super Bowl” - and does not want to be humiliated yet again. Rove’s plan would have to be so evil as to justify yet one more farcical White House claim that “no one could possibly have imagined” such a horrendous thing.

I pray that I am wrong. But ever since Karl Rove plucked Bush out of his drunken stupor to groom him for a career delivering speeches fed to him through an earpiece, just about everything I feared has come true.

The ellipses (…) in the excerpt above indicate places where I’ve deleted some content I thought irrelevant. Please follow the link in the header to read the unedited version, as originally posted on Democrats.com.

How far gone with BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) does someone have to be in order to actually believe something like this? So far as I can tell, the author of this piece has completely lost his ability to think and to reason. He appears to accept as facts obvious falsehoods, and to reflexively dismiss as false anything asserted by a Republican.

I am certainly not a mental health expert, but I believe it is the case that one of the major diagnostic indications for severe mental disturbance is a disconnection between objective reality and an individual’s perceptions of reality. And that seems to me to be exactly what’s going on here.

The really frightening thing is how many of these folks there are. Visit the three sites I’ve linked to see for yourself. Advice: I find this much more tolerable after a drink or three.

The real ponder: are the inmates on display at these sites going to take over the asylum?