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In a time when nothing is your fault, you are owed everything, you should not have to work for anything and everyone is a winner – I find this dose of reality refreshing:
Rule 1: Life is not fair – get used to it!
Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with an expense account until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault; so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you “FIND YOURSELF”. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television and video games are NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
Loosely based on the list penned by Charles J. Sykes, author of Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why America’s Children Feel Good About Themselves but Can’t Read, Write, or Add
Sorry Geoff, I work in Hollywood. #10 is downright subversive.
v.p. with a car phone…….? What year did you copy and paste these from?
Maybe you should read this……..it might help you get over it……
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110?link=mostpopular3
or better yet,….this….
“the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. “Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver,” he demands, “or less?”
The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: “MORE!”
The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.”
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109#ixzz1dnsCvXK1
It’s time this tool got schooled.
Point taken on the car phone – I have updated that.
This wasn’t aimed at OWS (much easier things to comment on there) but I can understand how you could feel that way given the nonsense coming out of the mouths of the Occupiers.
By the way, about the graphic: what is “UFE”? Is this the sound that a 1%er makes when you raise his taxes by $500?
I thought it was the sound a public union member made when you threatened to make him pay his fair share for his pension, medical , vacation, sick leave, 401(k), and other benefits. Or maybe it’s when you threaten to take away his air time that allows him to fraudulently inflate his benefits.
“Fair” here apparently meaning something other than “agreed upon,” I suppose?
What Willis fails to point out is that there ARE two sets of rules, and that is exactly what the OWS movement is mad about.
His continued harping about ” that’s life, get over it losers”…….is right up there with Gordon Gekkos “Greed is Good” and Marie’s” let them eat cake”.
Especially in the face of this staggering ponzi scheme we call the US financial system.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/owss-beef-wall-street-isnt-winning-its-cheating-20111025
Please show me what I have ever written that says “that’s life, get over it losers.” Everything I write is about taking personal responsibility for your actions. to be held accountable for your mistakes and to be rewarded for creativity, hard work and positive results and that everyone has the opportunity to be a success.
You wrote: “Rule 1: Life is not fair – get used to it!”
“Life is not fair” is actually a stronger statement than “that’s life,” and contains a flavor of “get over it, losers” if they don’t comply. (The entire list is addressed to people who haven’t complied — and who have lice in their closets.)
I like the “held accountable for your mistakes” bit, given your attempts to make that impossible for the likes of Herman Cain.
12. Be wealthy, well-connected, and loyal; cheat, steal from the vulnerable, and have your friends manipulate the rules to protect you and baffle the public to cover it up.
The myth of meritocracy doesn’t survive close examination, unless you see “merit” as the sort of thing rewarded by organized crime.
And before anyone screeches — yes, there are admirable exceptions. But the self-described meritocracy is working to squeeze them out.
You forgot a few words, Diamond, so I added them for you:
“12. Be wealthy, well-connected, and loyal [public union leaders]; cheat, steal from the vulnerable, and have your friends manipulate the rules to protect you and baffle the public to cover it up.”
You sure do love this “changing or inserting one word or phrase” wittiness of yours, don’t you?
No more than you love your “I’ll add another pithy Rule of Life to Geoff’s list to slam conservatives” tactic.
“In a time when nothing is your fault, you are owed everything, you should not have to work for anything and everyone is a winner – I find this dose of reality refreshing:”
Again with the absolutes. Well, I’ll give you one thing…you are CONSISTENTLY an absolutist. That, by the way, is not “reality”.
As a former high school teacher, I “taught” 9 of these (no #7 nor #10). Whether my students “learned” any of these depended upon your premise “you should not have to work for anything”. When I recall my faculty peers, we ALL taught these things. Funny post, but most of the students only “learned” 1% of what they were “taught”. Interestingly enough, just two generations ago, we all seemed to “learn” this from our teachers.
Tom, do you think that the difference from just two generations ago is respect or just cultural shift in viewpoint? We had the lost generation of the ’60’s and I fear that we are seeing the beginnings of another lost generation.
The “lost generation” of the 60s, young man? What are you nattering on about? You weren’t even there, what makes you think that the oldest baby boomers were a “lost generation”?
Well, you’re right about the almost 60,000 killed in Vietnam (and the more whose lives were destroyed after returning), but I doubt that that was your point. It does explain why so many vets support Occupy, though; they may be a little harder to fool.
I was there, granted as a kid – I was old enough to see the generation in between my parents and myself unplug for a decade or two before deciding that unplugging meant unconnected and that much of life had passed them by.
Sounds like a hallucination to me (and you were a little young for that.)
If this is true, rather than just your subjective impression from personal experience that you are trying to will into being a universal truth, it is probably evident in some sort of social statistics. Have you looked?
My sense, frankly, is that the early baby boomers, now in the mid-60s, are doing pretty damn well. Do you mean people born around 1955, or what?
Sorry, I can’t treat this as so likely to be true as to require refutation.
“… I was old enough to see the generation in between my parents and myself unplug for a decade or two before deciding that unplugging meant unconnected and that much of life had passed them by.”
You mean the baby-boomers, who went to college in record numbers, who went out and got good jobs and became the “yuppies” and who now control most of the wealth in this country?
The more Geoff pontificates, the more he reveals how much crap he BELIEVES.
Anonster,
You must be talking way back when college was affordable and you didn’t have to mortgage your life away to get an education.
Cranky Grampa Geoff… and only forty-something?
… reminds me my fridge magnet:
“When I was your age we had to walk three miles to get stoned and have sex.”
The post sounds like it could be attributed to George Everett Wilson (you have to be of fine vintage, like me, to get that one).
You kids git offa my grass!
If we actually did #5 Geoff. (Flipping Burgers) because it fits in with your sense of conservative virtue. We would not be able to afford the cost of living. Apartment, food, medical, transportation. We would then have to ask for special benefits for all of the above listed. That would turn us into a whiny turd looking for hand outs and special favors from all the “achievers”. In summary, You are full of turd Geoff.
Quite a few new shows on TV that are playing off the analogy of the current discontent.
You have the survivors as the 1 percent and then the 99 percent who are portrayed as fresh eating zombies.
Now if the complaining 99 percent would stop worrying and just enjoy their lives, they would not be so miserable.
How about the misery index, based on the number of people at the Occupy locations.
Irvine, two to three dozen people vs. Santa Ana, two to three people.
Irvine is considered a safe city with a high standard of living as compared to Santa Ana.
Why are they so miserable in Irvine?
Oh, oh, I think I know the answer to that last one! Because they’re being driven out of the middle class and into bankruptcy?
It sure seems that way.
I told my daughter if she didnt want to live at home whle going to college, thats fine with me. You can cook your own meals, do your own laundry and wake your own ass up.
She decided to move out, ask me to get her an apartment with washer dryer, a new car so she could get to school safely and have her boyfriend move in so he would wake her in the morning. Ugh, I should have seen that coming.
Many people can’t afford to put up their children in a separate apartment, with new washer/dryer, car, and bouncy bed. And our numbers are growing. You should have seen that coming too!
Geoff is auditioning for Andy Rooney’s spot.
I would actually like that gig.
Really? Are you like one of those Star Trek monsters that feeds off of others anguish?
Not all others, just yours.
From an evolutionary perspective, such a diet is very difficult to believe.
(If that perspective matters to you, of course.)
60.000 a year????————–LOSER!
interesting discussion but i am off to the commune to listen to some ravi shankar lp’s while tokin some of that good northern cali ganja
I wish I believed you.
Abolished failing grades?!
As a kid, I was confused when Archie Bunker and Edith sang “Those were the days” on All In The Family.
Nowadays I totally understand what they meant, and this blog post really drives it home.
Hey, it happened for George W. Bush, didn’t it?
I will say that it is not true in any of the schools my kids have attended here, from elementary through college.
Bush is the perfect metaphor for life not being fair–an overprivileged legacy who managed to dodge Vietnam, was given a baseball team, and then was placed into office without, as far as anyone can tell, a whiff of competence.
I never under-estimate the power of modern adult Naietivity. (sp?)
They’re all having a b1tch fit because you’re hittin ’em where it hurts.
Keep up the good work. The free ride will end some day, and these sh1t for brains might just have to flip burgers.