Tag: homilies

I Call Bullshit

We live in desperate times when the combination of an omnipotent social media and slipshod education has produced a generation whose philosophical IQ is measured out in clichés.  I call bullshit!  Let me demonstrate with a random selection of the trite musings running around the Internet these days.

dumb-people

The meek shall inherit the Earth — Yeah, I know it’s biblical, but in 2017 some Wall Street investment broker with a roomful of lawyers is going to contest the will.

Age is only a number — You ever notice the people spouting this nonsense are all under 35?

That which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger — Clearly, whoever thought this one up was never hit by a bus.  When they haul you away from that little mishap, you’ll wish to hell the bus hadda finished the job.

White Privilege — Why am I being arbitrarily profiled because my ancestors happen to come from Northern Europe?  We have a name for people who judge other people by their racial ancestry. . . .

Everything happens for a reason — Do you really think the universe cares if you fall down the stairs?  Google Copernicus, ya moron!

Do what you love and the money will follow — I want to see the person who’s going to pay me to eat Doritos™, drink Pepsi™ and binge-watch Netflix™.

Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans — This is nothing more than a bad excuse for never making any plans in the first place.

You have to look through the rain to see the rainbow — You’re at a bus stop on a deserted highway.  It’s 9:30 at night and pissin’ down rain.  You haven’t seen a bus, a car, a person or a stray dog in over an hour.  Three bikers pull up and ask for your wallet.  Oh, look!  There’s the rainbow!

If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade — This might be true if life also handed you a pitcher, some water, sugar and something to stir it all with, and — BTW — one lemon isn’t going to make very much lemonade.

And finally:

Money isn’t everything/Money can’t buy happiness — I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor: take a wild guess which one I prefer.

Older and (somewhat) Wiser?

There are tons of old people lists floating around the Internet.  They run all the way from old advertisements with doctors smoking cigarettes to lists of things that the world had never even heard of when grandma was a kid.  Some of them have this smug undercurrent of “things were so much better in my day,” but generally they’re all just harmless ways to play Remember When.   However, they all have a tendency to unlock the inner dinosaur in most of us and make us remember that we’ve been strolling around this earth for a long, long time.  Unfortunately, none of these lists makes any mention of what it takes to survive the rigors of life and actually arrive at an age when you can afford the luxury of nostalgia.  Nor do they offer a list of all those neat little goodies we all pick up along the way — the tricks of the trade, so to speak.  Things like white shirts attract spaghetti sauce and doctors are never on time.

It takes a lot to get old, and when you do, you need to stop every once in a while and congratulate yourself.  You finally made it, and now you’re old enough to know:

Puppies are a natural antidepressant

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.  Somebody, somewhere is going to have to pay for that Happy Meal™.  And if you eat it, chances are good it’ll be you.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Lincoln was right.  You can fool some of the people all of the time.  The rest of it he just made up.

Integrity is what you do when nobody’s looking.

The meek may inherit the earth, but there’s always going to be at least one big, nasty bugger there who wants to contest the will.

There is justice in the world, but most people mistake it for fairness.  That’s why they get pissed off.

Nothing feels as good as warm on a cold day.

Everybody says they want the truth — until it actually shows up.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line — no matter how many times you think you found a shortcut.

The major difference between smart and wise is a couple of bad decisions.

Most people simply don’t have enough money to get rich quick.

We’re all in the same boat; some of us just have a different captain.

And finally:

Like Polonius’ adv ice to Laertes, most of the feel good/words of wisdom homilies are just crap.