As the years start to whiz by faster (not fast enough until I can retire), I am trying very hard to look for some kind of sign that better times are just around the corner. A happy ending is waiting to unfold and I can stroll off into the sunset and know I have lived a rewarding and meaningful life.
Unfortunately, all I can surmise is that bills do not stop coming and the world is mighty tight with its money. I have lost most (if not all) of my youthful idealism, which, as an artist/musician, was ALL I had to fall back on, really. Now that I am faced with the affordable technology to produce my own movies and albums, I find I just don’t have the same level of energy, and I have certainly given up on ever making a difference in the world. While I think this is the normal cycle for us, I still can’t avoid the feeling that I am being gypped out of… something.
Maybe, just maybe, that “dare to be great” idealism is pointing me in the direction of teaching. I think there are a
few very valuable and important lessons that need to be taught in every 8th grade class to prepare young minds for the real world.
The first would be that having a child as a kid themselves will not only take up all of their time, but in the case of males, they will be terribly demonized and expected to generate an amount of revenue equal to the daily take of an average Best Buy® or Target® store to fulfill their child support quotas while trying to pay their own living expenses simultaneously. I guess sending the girls home with one of those life-like dolls that cry, piss, and keep a running tally of incidents of abuse and neglect are a noble effort, but there is no real punishment to deter them from simply tossing the thing under a pile of clothes in their closet all weekend (I know this because my mother was in charge of the program for several years).
The second lesson they should be taught is to have the teacher lock the classroom door and produce 25 to 30 fifths of some type of 80 proof beverage and a carton of Marlboros and force the students to drink and smoke until they are vomiting all over themselves and their teenage bedrooms for a week. This would take the average young mind light years beyond the predictable “I’m never drinking again” promise after a tame bottle of Boone’s Farm or two quarts of Colt 45. There would, of course, be cries of abuse from parents and the law, and keeping in mind the many degrading and compromising actions that can and do occur during drunken spells far removed from the classroom, this does seem a somewhat toothless idea now that I think of it, but as far as associating the desire to die with a large glass bottle of anything or a cigarette, it’s a good start.
Another important lesson would be to inform the class that famous characters of classic works of fiction who “get theirs” in the end are just that: works of fiction! Oh sure, they could point to the occasional Bernie Madoff or Saddam Hussein as examples of how bad guys don’t win or that crime doesn’t pay, but there are, unfortunately, institutionalized bad guys like the carnies at Blue Cross or the pus-bags that set the rates for your gas bill in the winter (because it was a “very cold winter”: I’m not making that up). These derelicts not only get away with abusing people, squeezing their last pennies from them, and in some cases, killing them, who not only escape anything that resembles justice, but are in many cases rewarded with multi-million dollar bonuses for their efforts annually.
The kids should be shown A Christmas Carol and tell them, “It’s a great story and all, but in the real world there would have been no ghosts of Christmas past, present, or future to point out what an inhuman turd Ebeneezer Scrooge was, and that more than likely, Bob Cratchet would have to sell off his run-down house to pay for Tiny Tim’s medical care before he is left for dead ultimately for having a pre-existing condition to which any further treatment would be out of the question”.
I hate to say it, but things seem very bleak when I hear certain lawmakers, when confronted with these issues, shrug them off and suggest that these are matters that need to be taken care of by “family, friends, and neighbors”. As if we can all just run out to the money trees we have growing in our backyards and pick a wad of fifties and hand them over to everyone we might know who happens to be a little short on cash.
The thing that set me off here was an infomercial advertising a set of CDs featuring the hit songs of the 80’s. I never thought I would live to see a more depressing decade where greed, corruption, and selfishness would become such run-of-the-mill and expected human attitudes than that of the 80’s, but we have topped it, and I really do hope that better things are waiting in the next decade. But when the crimes of Ted Bundy seem as heinous as shop-lifting a purse compared to any given episode of Criminal Minds: when people protest angrily to give health insurance companies and their share-holders even more of our (and ironically, their own) money: when a snot-nosed burglar in Oregon has become some kind of folk hero because his mother has been hiding him out in her trailer… I am not holding my breath.
I guess, if I were forced to be optimistic about the future, I can safely say that we don’t have much further DOWN to go, so, hey – HAPPY NEW YEAR!