The Ten New Realities of Life

 This is one of those essays that I paint off the landscape and make suggestions over reality of our times:

1.  Drugs and broken-homes....tend to lead to an outcome with no positives.  It's like an infestation of termites, and no willing nature to call the bug-guy.  Then one day you wake up and want to take care of the termites but now realize the home is a loss, with value gone.

2.  A kid with no finance sense might be stupid enough to borrow $120,000....get a degree, and discover that the degree will never get him more than $40k a year.  Then the idiot does the math to figure it's a twenty to twenty-five year period to pay back the $120,000 and that $40,000 at some local community college would have gotten you the same $40k a year salary. Around age forty, the 'kid' now comes to you...literally begging for $40,000 to pay off the remainder of the stupid loan.

3.  We are beleaguered on a daily basis by people stating a problem, then giving you two 'false' choices....meaning neither meets an acceptable reality.  You look at the guy explaining this (some intellectual type) and offer up a 3rd choice.  Then you get this ten-minute lecture....that there are only two false choices....don't go messing up their argument.  You wake up at this point, realizing dozens of problems exist, and you are routinely led to the false choice scenario.

4.  You stand in a church atmosphere....realizing one day that of the past twenty-five sermons....at least fifty percent didn't have much to do with the Bible, but more so with political topics or global warming. You confront this reality and start looking at the Deacons and the Minister...wondering about this was a long-term strategy.

5.  Senators and House members are now waking up to the idea that Chinese secret agents are trying to get 'friendly' with them....offering money or sex as part of the deal.  It's going to be hard holding back 'feelings'.

6.  Basically, if you just read a science journal/magazine once a month now....you can be a 'science-guy'.  Its silly and stupid, but there's over 3,000 science-guys appearing on TV in an average year, and a quarter of them are 'just' engineers....not even real scientists.  In the case of Bill Gates....he's just an expert on Excel or Powerpoint. 

7.  Once the minimum wage goes to $15....the clock at McDonalds starts ticking.  If you automate 75-percent of the place.....you can dispose of three-quarters of the man-power over the next decade.  What exactly will marginally-capable do then?  You don't need burger-flippers, ditch-diggers, or shelf-stockers at the grocery as automation arrives.  

8.  The value of a EdD degree (doctor of education)?  You basically can run a school....that's it.  On ranking worthless degrees....this is probably number one.

9.  The value of a trailer-park lifestyle in 2020?  Some folks need the benefit of local characters, drunks, and schizophrenics to liven up their life.

10.  Politics is now 99-percent theatrics.  People are wasting hours of everyday....trying figure out how 'Bay City' will go, if Pamela will leave David, if Doctor Winston is really gay, if the neighbors who just moved in are actually from Paraguay, or if Frederic has a tumor on his butt.