Real Milestones
By Thomas Gallant
The way life used to work, the only time you got free extra credit was getting your name right on the SATs. While I’m hesitant to use the term “back in my day” as it reminds me of people that have grey hair growing out of their nostrils and ears, it would appear that the current generation of youngsters (aka: my friend’s kids) are just given too much to be happy about.
Now, I’ve got plenty of friends that still live to play Mortal Kombat and admit that ours is the video game generation that is compounding the errors of our youth in to our own offspring, but at the rate we’re going these kids are going to want a fucking congratulatory banquet after successfully executing their parents’ funerals. I think the benefits of a good education and extra curricular activities are obvious, but do we have to pin a medal on a kid every time he wipes his ass?
Cruising my Facebook newsfeed recently, in between gripes about the weather I’ve noticed that it is graduation season. While I’ve been known to rant about the monotony that infests Facebook updates, I can understand people posting pictures or status messages about themselves or their loved ones getting a hard earned diploma. High School graduation, big accomplishment. College graduation (sans herpes), huge accomplishment. Pre-K graduation? Get the fuck out of here. How can you graduate from something that apparently hasn’t even happened yet? Congratulations little Jimmy! You’ve been awarded the opportunity to go into Kindergarten where you’ll learn how to finger paint and hopefully stop pissing the bed.
In other news, to the disappointment of pedophiles everywhere little league season will be wrapping up soon. Watching your kids learn to play sports is great. They develop some skills, run around awkwardly, games seemingly take forever, and it gives you an excuse to hit Burger King on the way home. At the end of the season, there are playoffs and a championship and a team of good kids that wins it all might just remain friends and keep talking about that memory forever. Sure, it could be the peak of their athletic ability and they talk about it as overweight tire salesmen in their 40’s but there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong is all those kids that didn’t win that still get a trophy. What did we learn today kids? That losing is ok, and still comes with a shiny prize.
Life is not a happy meal. Loss and reward are mutually exclusive. Let’s focus on actual accomplishment and not just high fives for good effort and maybe we’ll get back to being a productive society.
TG
