Reality Check

Sometimes you just sit and wonder: When is shit going to get better? You try and do your best to live up to the standard that has been behooved upon us. It has been preached that we can accomplish whatever it is we set our mind to. Maybe that is true, or maybe it's just true for those select few whose paths have already been laid out. However, why is it that some of the smartest people I know are some of the most disadvantaged people I know? There's a guy I know who can quote almost every piece of William Butler Yeats that you can possibly imagine. His speech is eloquent and his comprehension of literature is vast. His knowledge is not the off the wall trivia bullshit Ala Jeopardy, instead his learnedness has a breadth and width that is vast enough to take even the most inane conversation to the brink of an epiphany. With this deep background and ability to dissect even the most obscure passage, you would think that he was a college professor or even a man of letters. Nope. The man worked for the water company of Alameda, taking test samples of still water, putting them in vials, wrapping the vials in plastic, placing them in a small cardboard box and then placing them in an even larger cardboard box. This is what he did from 8am to 4:30pm every single day for 8 years until they laid him off. Now, when you pose the question: How the hell did you end up there? His reply, "Well, I never really went to school".

Our definition of knowledge is a farce. When you walk into a job interview, the first thing they look to is your experience and then where it is you got your degree from. My question is how fucking valid is that degree? I knew a kid who got his degree by cheating on every test and copying the homework of every good looking honey he could find. Now, he has a degree from The University of Santa Clara and a prestigious job as a hedge fund manager in the city of San Francisco. The degree he attained is amazing in the eyes of the everyday public, but in terms of being a learned individual it means fuck all. What he holds is a piece of paper signed by a former movie star governor. Ask him to dissect a passage by Eudora Welty and watch the ums fly. Plop him down in front of a desk and place a myriad of geometry and calculus problems in front of him and good fucking luck. Yet in society's eyes the cheater with the piece of paper is considered a far more valuable piece of man power then the self taught, hard working, water packer. Now, I am pretty sure I am not the only who wishes to say this, but to put is as succinctly as possible: What the fuck is up with that? When did we as a society put such value on state approved curriculum and expensive pieces of paper with stamps on them? Maybe Darwin was incorrect after all. Maybe the strong aren't the only ones to survive. Maybe the cheating, paper yielding douchebags are the ones to rule the earth. I don't know about you, but I'm hoping for a pretty big asteroid at this juncture. What say you?