# dumb furniture guys 070418 With the exponential (?) rise of the crap job (which is used to tout “low unemployment” and “growing economy”), you have vast swaths of adult population relegated, in terms of intellect and morale, to the level of a disaffected high school kid, with the media consumption and critical thinking skills to match. But they’re high school kids without adult supervision, because they’re supposed to *be* the adults. We’re in trouble already. It’s the new peasantry—they need to be babysat. At least some of them resent it, but don’t have the resources to do much about it. Some of them don’t even know it’s happening (they think they have choices and free will), because of, you know, Fox news and YouTube and god knows what even more subtle infiltrations of our consciousness—fucking nanobots straight into the blood stream for all we know, delivered via 48-oz non-biodegradable injections of corn syrup every day. No wonder (as Anne pointed out) the people at Wal Mart in Cape look “rough.” Fucking scary is more like it. The revolution is not going to be noble. It’s going to be fake, or else accidental. The ladders and anchors that used to keep you out of this class are transmogrifying, too. College? Which one? One of the real ones, or one of the for-profit bus-ad ones? How about your family’s resources, then? Well apparently the days of doing better than your parents have already peaked, so, you know, sorry about that. Spend what’s left of your inheritance wisely, I guess, and hope your grandkids are really creative or lucky? With regard to “what I think,” school teaches us a lose-lose double whammy. Our use of *properly formatted MLA citations* is micromanaged, and graded to a weirdly picayune degree. If it’s even explained why this is important, the gist behind the edu-speak is basically that we’re not an authority on anything, and therefore nothing we say matters unless we’re quoting someone (or some institution, or some mysterious text or video that appears on a screen and who the fuck knows how nebulous the connection to a fellow human being’s brain may be) who has official credentials and therefore knows better. Research=Google. On the other hand, we’re given cutesy self-esteem-building “What do you think?” busy work, because it’s easier to get kids to write if it’s non-debatable narcissistic pseudo-exploration of whatever position they’ve been taught (by their parents? by the Internet?) to have chosen off the menu that always amounts to “pick one from column A *OR* one from column B.” What skill does this sort of exercise develop? How to get likes by being loud for your corporate overlord? Or maybe it teaches you how to self-diagnose, another very useful skill. As soon as we’re old enough to unlock an iPhone, we’re continuously invited to declare our special circumstances. Chances are, you’re either depressed, anxious, autistic (oh you know, at least probably a little bit “on the spectrum”), gender dysmorphic, or some variant of ADHD. And if you’re not one of those, you can always get addicted to opiates. For shit’s sake, they gave my 8-year-old daughter narcotics just for having a couple of teeth pulled. Why? Who encourages that sort of prescription? Who benefits? I didn’t give it to her, of course—she barely even needed a couple of ibuprofen—I ate the stuff myself as a way to avoid thinking about all of this for a couple of nights. #pdp