Downright Wrong Lessons I Learned In High School

Not my high school (Wikipedia)

High school was a magical time for me. Seventh grade bullies turned out to be losers, geeks like me found friends, and many of us had our first real shot at shaping our futures with vocational classes, the arts, and college-level electives. For the first time ever, I enjoyed how old I was. I had enough freedom to make my own schedule, learn what I wanted to learn, and do what I wanted to do.

During this relatively euphoric and glorious period, I learned many important life lessons. Unfortunately, some of them turned out to be completely, totally, miserably wrong. Here's a sampling of the ones I had to learn over again.


More Is Better!

Shawshank Redemption via Kloipy

Back when I knew everything, I knew nothing about nuance. Less was less, and more was more. With this sort of beautifully simplistic thinking, I was certain that if a tactic worked, then even more of that tactic would surely work better. The most galling display of this wisdom of mine reared its head whenever I made morning announcements. Having spent many years acting and developing a full-throated "stage voice" of which I was quite proud, I deemed it important to unleash this beast through the PA system onto the ears of 2,000 half-awake students and faculty in the mornings to make them pay attention. Looking back, I imagine a few people still remember my announcements, but rather for the earaches I gave them instead of the messages.

Popularity Contests are Immature!

Napoleon Dynamite (source)

High school introduced me to the awesome world of responsibility, merit, and general grownup-edness. Imagine my surprise, then, to see Homecoming court and student government elections still amounting to little more than popularity and likability elections. What were we in? Middle school??

Certain that the likability factor was just a temporary holdover from puberty, I ran for student government and applied for jobs around town based purely on my merit and abilities. Lo and behold, I succeeded in getting both, thus proving my conviction that hard skills were the sole reason to bestow a position upon someone in the adult world!

Okay, in retrospect, my conviction wasn't really "proved". No one ran against me for class VP, and after local music studios and radio stations pushed my job-seeking tail out the door, I was finally hired to lug tables up flights of stairs, shoulder-to-shoulder with guys who mooned each other from the tops of buildings and taped each other to walls when work was slow. I was also considered my interviewer's "last present" because he wasn't well-liked and had decided to quit before my first day. So much for that conviction of mine. I was halfway through college before I finally bought into the importance of personality and networking in elections and the hiring process.

Rules Are For Everyone Else!

Office Space via IMCDB

Getting in the good graces of faculty and staff worked wonders for me getting around rules in high school. I got security codes, door keys, preferred parking, use of school vehicles, and equipment that no one wanted. They never said a word to me about the cell phones I wore either. Of course, I appreciated the trust they placed in me and took my responsibilities seriously, but my ego was so massive that I walked out of that school thinking that rules didn't really apply to me.

Har har har, what a joke. It turned out that real world rules are nothing like the ones in high school. Many high school policies exist as a protection blanket against juvenile wrongdoers. Real world rules govern the money, safety, and fairness of adults, so they're a touch more serious.  They don't bend for certain people like I'd hoped and thought; they just bend for certain situations.

High School Seniors Are Adults Too, Just Younger!

Animal House

Yeah, right. In true "you don't know what you don't know" fashion, I was sure I had the world on a string once I left school, with a steady stream of big boy decision-making waiting anxiously in my near future. Turns out, what I didn't know while strutting down the football field in my mortarboard was that I hadn't even begun to make all my stupid mistakes on the way to adulthood. But, how is an 18-year-old who's never been exposed to love, vices, or living on his own supposed to know that? Answer: college.

Like many folks, the most liberal I ever was was in college. Beer? Girls? Hope? Bring it! While I don't regret any of the stuff I did in college, I learned a lot of hard lessons (thank you Vegas and summer stock theatre) that helped me discover just how not grown-up I actually was.

There's Only One Correct Answer!

I freak out like this too. (source)

Here's one I got right! Well, "right" as long as I was talking about something I actually knew, like arithmetic or colors.  In high school, I failed to consider just about everything around me, and never picked up on the fact that I sat in different chairs, played different musical instruments, and used different computers and pens that flew in the face of my one-answer-to-every-question view of the world.

I've given up searching for the ultimate solution to everything. Since there's no real way for me to completely stamp out my ignorance of the world around me, I'll keep on living my life according to the best lessons I've learned.  I'll also try to not freak out next time I find out I'm wrong again, which I bet will happen by sundown.

The Ugly Step-sister of Invention

photo: Jay Jay

Necessity, as the old saying goes, is the mother of Invention.

Throughout history, great success has come to those who have fulfilled people's needs with new inventions such as cars, airplanes, electricity, and fad diets. Though many of these fledgling industries grew to enormous proportions and helped shape the world as we know it today, two unpleasant by-products eventually surfaced to become a total buzz-kill for everyone at the party. The first was government regulation, aiming to protect economic, political, and personal interests. The second was Standardization, Invention's ugly step-sister.

Normally, Standardization doesn't get people all hot and bothered. She's boring, complicated, and restrictive, mostly reactive to situations, and not much of a headliner. But, there she is, constantly being eyed by businesses as a means to increase market share, reduce costs, and benefit from someone else's trials and tribulations.

As industry competitors start flexing their muscles by courting Standardization, incompatible or even adversarial product ecosystems can develop that muddy the market. Satellite radio, for example, comes in three distinct yet wholly incompatible flavors: Sirius, XM, and SiriusXM. Proprietary hard drive formats still make file transfers between Macs and PCs a hassle. Both DVD-RW and DVD+RW discs exist, and I still haven't really figured out the difference between them. For consumers, these kinds of incompatibilities just add confusion and unnecessary hurdles to market growth, and even when a true industry standard develops, it isn't always the best one.

When I say "product ecosystems", I'm referring to a distinct class of products that depend on other compatible products in order to serve a purpose. CDs and CD players, for example, constitute a simple ecosystem; one is not useful without the other. I'm not talking, however, about products that are intrinsically useful without relying on standards or much else, such as competing shirts from the Gap or Abercrombie or even cars from Buick or Ford. The world is big enough for—and indeed thrives off of—healthy competition and differentiation among standalone products. What hurts markets, at least in the short term, is industry titans who take their products and go running off in different directions like a herd of rabid cats, developing their own ecosystems often according to adversarial standards.

photo: DGfromMTL

Think back, for example, to the war between VHS and Betamax video players, or more recently to the shootout between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray video players. With billions of dollars at stake, studios and electronics manufacturers fought tooth and nail to champion similar yet incompatible home video ecosystems using a winner-take-all approach that ultimately left consumers and investors to pick up the pieces.

This is where standardization gets hairy: sometimes manufacturers make sweeping decisions to dig their heels in and fight their competitors' ideas at all costs. In the years surrounding 1890, the War of the Currents saw Thomas Edison develop an ingenious electrical system capable of sending power a few miles from a generator to urban customers and factories. George Westinghouse, however, pressed doggedly for a far more complex system that allowed higher-voltage electricity to travel hundreds of miles. In turn, AC power allowed massive central stations to be built that could be located well away from city customers, while simultaneously bringing rural customers into the market base who could not afford a DC system. Over the course of several years, each side spent ungodly amounts trying to drown the other in patent lawsuits. Edison's side even got down and dirty in the public arena by promoting lethal AC electrocutions of dogs, horses, and even humans. Finally, once AC beat DC as the world's de facto distribution system, Edison's company, by now General Electric, did indeed come around and began making devices compatible with the system Westinghouse had championed all along.

photo: Maciej Lewandowski

Sometimes, incompatible standards arise from simple matters of preference, and don’t rear their ugly heads until much later. In the early industrial days of the United States, railroad companies were free to choose their own rail gauges, or the distance between rails. Compatibility wasn’t really an issue since most railroads operated autonomously and darted directly inland from the coast. It just so happened that in the process, most northern companies adopted standard gauge from the British, while those in the south adopted broad gauge from the Russians. This meant that if you wanted to send one of your trains from Pennsylvania to South Carolina, the rail gauge would fluctuate more often than the demeanor of a bipolar schizophrenic, and you’d be forced to either change out the axles on your train, or move your goods from one train to another entirely. By the time Congress declared standard gauge “standard” in 1862, the Southern states had already seceded, formed their own club, and were up to their necks in civil war. Ironically, over the course of the war, this railroad incompatibility became a key defense mechanism, preventing soldiers from riding the rails across enemy lines.

In the end, once Lincoln got the South in a headlock and forced them to drawl “uncle” in 1865, it was another 20 years before mounting economic pressure from the Yanks finally coerced the southern railroad companies to switch over to standard gauge and play nice with the rest of the country. In 1886, with laudable preparation and exacting precision, the undertaking of converting 11,000 miles of southern rail to standard gauge was completed in less than two days!

photo: Paul Harvey

Fortunately, many standards emerge and mature relatively unimpeded and unchallenged. After a decade of trial-and-error, the essence of the QWERTY keyboard we use today was introduced in 1878. The year 1909 brought the standardized paper roll for player pianos, which in turn helped standardize the number of keys later found on electric pianos and synthesizers. The US standard for analog color TV, brilliantly engineered to be backward-compatible with existing black-and-white TV sets, debuted in 1953. In that time too came standards for the brake lights on cars, the frequencies for commercial radio stations, and the sizes of doors in public buildings.

It is for this reason that some smart companies develop consortiums that transcend their own businesses. Consortiums allow competitors and partners both to develop common frameworks on which to base their product ecosystems. Think your iPhone is completely different than an Android phone? Nope! In fact, there are more similarities between the two platforms than there is water in a watermelon (92% water, to be exact). They access the Internet the same way, use basically the same cell towers, make the same phone calls, send the same emails, and receive the same text messages. In essence, the only thing stopping you from communicating with a phone from another manufacturer would be your own snobbish superiority complex. Thank you, Standardization!

Now (tounge-in-cheek alert), if we could just get our political systems to standardize too...

Drug Testing for Welfare is Unright

You might have heard recently that Wyoming just mowed down a movement requiring welfare recipients to submit to drug testing. And good thing, too. As many other states weigh the pros and cons of similar legislation, they can look to Wyoming, home of the world's largest Special Olympics truck convoy, as a role model.

A quick Google search reveals that Wyoming's reasons for shooting this bill down in a blaze of glory smack of the same logic Florida used to put welfare drug testing on hiatus a couple months ago. Down there, a federal judge claimed that such testing violated citizens' Fourth Amendment right to a protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

Now, like most debates, this sucker has more than one side to it. Those who support welfare drug testing cite many arguments, my favorite being, "Shouldn't you have to pass a urine test to collect a welfare check, since I have to pass one to earn it for you?"  On the other hand those who oppose the measure, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, preach that filling that little cup is "a reflection of ugly stereotypes that people who need a helping hand from the state are drug dealers."

And what an ugly, utterly unfounded stereotype it is! Drugs aren't the root problem among welfare-reliant people. The drug trade is a 600 billion dollar business! Even the white-collar guys convicted of insider trading and securities fraud have a hard time getting in on that many greenbacks. The real problem government dependents face is the lack of handouts. Without these, studies show that as their money runs thin, the crime rate goes up. Of course, since the crime rate also rises with drug use, it follows that, by slightly tweaking the rules of logic, a lack of handouts inevitably leads to drug use, which then leads to more arrests and more incarceration. In the end you get stats like this: over 7 million citizens are incarcerated in the US or are being monitored by law enforcement, with inmates each being babysat to the tune of about $35,000 annually.

Clearly, then, the government needs to change its attitude about those in need who occupy themselves by tasting colors and laughing at sidewalks. The administrators need to spend more time dishing out extra dollars to these folks, rather than cutting off their money supply just because they're more likely to use the revolving door of the penitentiary as a merry-go-round. Only then can we stop this out of control spiral we face where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and just keep the poor right where they are.

But, that's just my two cents.  The Florida judge used a different slippery slope fallacy in her dissertation, stating that “If invoking an interest in preventing public funds from potentially being used to fund drug use were the only requirement to establish a special need, the state could impose drug testing as an eligibility requirement for every beneficiary of every government program." After all, who is the government to discriminate as to who gets taxpayers' money? It must be cognizant of the fact that justice is blind, and so should be the people writing the checks. It's not like government is a business or anything.

As a quick reminder, all men (and I guess women) are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights including Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. If the government starts dishing out benefits based on whether or not applicants use illegal drugs, then how are beneficiaries supposed to enjoy their God-given right to pursue/inject/snort happiness? Most laws don't exist to reward based on merit; they exist to level the playing field and make a just society that takes from each according to his ability, and distributes to each according to his need for a fix.

Candy and Strangers

Taking candy from strangers isn't a bad thing.

In fact, once someone's old enough to realize that subsequently getting in a big white van is dangerous even if it's headed to church, taking things from strangers almost becomes a social expectation. After all, those pink boxes of Christmas donuts and chocolate left anonymously in the office aren't going to eat themselves!

High school politics and fundraising utterly depend on folks taking candy from strangers. The relentless battery of lollipops dished out during these popularity contests for class president represent a much tastier approach to locking in votes than going around kissing illegitimate babies and promising to hire Deadmau5 for a residency in the cafeteria. (Full disclosure: I myself won a landslide election for class VP out of a barrage of opponents numbering exactly zero.) Without candy sales, how could the marching band afford to go pummel the morale out of lesser schools at competitions? How would the Shakespeare club raise money to perform at festivals if it weren't for bake sales? Put on shows or something?

This whole anti-social candy doctrine many kids learn is part of a house of cards just waiting to come crashing down on ol' Saint Nick and the tooth fairy. As far as I was concerned as a young Lego-eater, we were expected to speak when spoken to and eat what us country folk called a "polite bite" whenever someone kindly offered up food. We went out crusading in itchy yet conversation-inducing costumes on Halloween, totally banking on getting treats instead of tricks at each house before returning home to brutalize our stomaches and tease out diabetes at night's end. We would go out to meet the ice cream men, and as long as they could speak English good, they were okay in our book.

If at seven years old I had been told to not take candy from strangers, then been kicked out my front door to go sell boxes of Girl Scout cookies to them, I'd have had a conniption over the horrific logic. Really? I could talk to strangers to sell them candy, but couldn't take any from them? That hypocritical stance would be like saying China could sell high-tech products into the US, but couldn't get any in return (oh wait, that's real). I'd also be really embarrassed and mad at the person who decided to smuggle little Jesse into Girl Scouts in the first place.

The fact is, taking candy from strangers and striking up small conversations as we grew up taught many of us to be more normal than anything. Maybe a little fatter. Heck, for all I know, those interactions might be the only thing standing between me and tin foil hats right now. All in all, there's little reason to be scared about taking candy from a stranger, as long as that stranger isn't one of those rampant weirdos that steals kids.

Socially-Awkward Dog

Late the other night, I almost tripped over a silhouetted Mittelspitz on a sidewalk who, despite her owner's pull on the leash, had planted herself right in my path as I was walking by. Her owner quickly apologized to me, quipping, "she's a sidewalk hog". I chuckled a bit and walked past, soon realizing that:

I HAD JUST MET SOCIALLY-AWKWARD DOG!!!

The backstory leading up to this humiliating level of excitement had actually begun several months earlier. Like Pongo in 101 Dalmatians, I had started each day by spending a few minutes judging owners and their dogs as they walked through the neighborhood on their missions to stake claim to every fire hydrant in sight.

Having never actually owned a dog or other attention-hungry animal, I had in these few months found it fascinating to watch dogs' interactions whenever they met on the sidewalk. Like a bunch of 5-year-old kids, most dogs wanted to play. Like a bunch of 15-year-old kids, a few shamelessly wanted to do the nasty, while others ran for the hills. And then, like a stoner competing in the Special Olympics, there was Socially-Awkward Dog.

This dog surprised me. At first I thought she was just shy. Whenever she encountered another dog who wanted to wish her Top o' the Morning, she hid behind her owner and faced away. Occasionally she would freeze in place and pretend to be in a happy place watching grass grow. Being partial to awkwardidity myself, seeing Socially-Awkward Dog would thoroughly make my day, and I soon started keeping an eye out for her specifically. The night I nearly tripped over her in the dark though, I realized that she didn't quite understand that she'd just lined herself up to take a shin-kick to the face, and it dawned on me that she's not just awkward, she's actually stupid. And it got me to thinking.

Everyone knows a "special" dog or two. I've met a couple that tend to bury themselves in strangers' crotches, haven't figured out how to turn left, or like to bulldoze their way across carpet using their foreheads. If these dogs were human, they'd be in mental hospitals. But they're not...they're just funny.

The underlying issue here is that, with the advent of veterinary clinics and breeding over the last 15,000 years or so, the process of natural selection has been almost entirely removed from the canine species. No longer is it survival of the fittest, but rather survival of the cutest. We're breeding beautiful, docile little creatures whose crowning achievements include warming feet and bringing in the morning paper. Granted, we do have dogs that spend their entire lives looking for drugs, but again, if they were doing that as humans they'd have ended up in the slammer a long time ago.

Over the past thirty years or so, dog companionship has been steadily on the rise. They say a dog is man's best friend. They also say that someone can tell a lot about you based on the company you keep. Needless to say, the signs aren't looking good. At this rate I'll be tripping over people standing on the sidewalk by the time I'm 50, but that might be because natural selection is a joke for humans now too...and it's not very funny. But at least we'll all be pretty!

Why Duels Should Make a Comeback

If you're like most folks in the Western world, one of the few phrases you won't see much in popular media is "defending honor".  It certainly seems that over the course of the last century or so, honor has taken a back seat to self-determinism, independence, and spiting your parents for the fun of it.  It's high time for it to make a comeback.

What is honor?  According to the Oxford Dictionary on my Mac, it's respect, esteem, or a woman's chastity.  I'm only arguing for the first two definitions here.  The problem today's young whippersnappers have—this so-called Millennial Generation—is that we're way more focused on feeling good about ourselves and our buddies in the now than we are on being socially proper or respectable over the long haul.  In general, we jump from job to job as we get bored, get married when we feel like it instead of when we're "supposed" to, and value instant gratification above reputation and dignity (because that picture of you in high school with a toilet seat around your neck, beer in hand, is WAY too funny to keep off of Facebook).

How can we go about re-instilling honor in the West?  It obviously works well for our Asian counterparts.  A Japanese third grader vying to protect his family's honor academically could run laps around most English-speaking college freshman.  Thanks to a national sense of honor, communist China has its act together well enough to own a quarter of the US debt (though even China crosses the street when it sees European debt coming down the sidewalk).  If history has any answers for us, we may find that re-legalizing duels to defend our honor will work wonders in revitalizing us so that we are better people physically, mentally, and socially.

For anyone who favors bringing back the draft, this should make sense: people who tremble for their lives are far more likely to appreciate what they're defending when what they're defending demands it.  It's kinda like Stockholm syndrome but cooler.  Tell people their honor is at stake whenever someone drops a glove at their feet or builds a mosque in Lower Manhattan, and you'll have a clan of honor-hungry people looking to off anyone and anything that threatens them.  After all, that's what made Rome great!

Duels work like this: you offend the honor of some holier-than-thou person with a rod up his backside, he gets his underpants all in a twist, and then he challenges you to defend your own honor with your life.  You either accept the challenge, or slink away solemnly to live out your days in shame.  If you accept, you get to pick the weapons, be they swords, pistols, or perhaps sausages.  You and the Holy One each pick a best mate to try and litigate on your behalf first, and if that doesn't work, then GAME ON!  Alternatively, if you're more hands-on you can duel by partaking in "gouging", which is more like wrestling with an aim to gouge out the eye of your opponent or—less preferably all around—mutilate his genitals.  This was prevalent in the American south of the plantation era, where it would probably still be favored today by the best trailer trash still vying for Darwin Award nominations.

The constant, giddy excitement one would feel from never knowing when he'd be invited to a duel would lead to some pretty great perks.  One, people would stop slagging on their least loved brethren for fear of death or castration.  Two, everyone would have a reason to take fencing classes, which would both invigorate the economy and trim down the increasing population of fat people.  Three, everyone would have a great new story to tell about themselves or their friends.  And four, losers of gouging would have a fabulous opportunity to put on pirate costumes and put their eye patches to good use at Halloween parties.

Sure, there might be some opponents to this, such as the Catholic Church who would call this practice barbaric or ungodly, but they also banned crossbows and contraception so their sense of fun is a bit passé.  Politicians might also make an example of the duel between Alexander Hamilton, the original architect of the US economic system, and Aaron Burr who was VP to Thomas Jefferson at the time.  But, Jefferson didn't like either guy so most of us don't really care.

The long and the short of it is, duels are a great "Invisible Hand" that would whip us into shape both physically and socially.  And given what we've learned about prison reform, being in better physical shape makes us feel better about ourselves.  When we feel better about ourselves, we are more likely to get along socially and might even achieve world peace.  Then, every Miss World contestant would see her cliché wish come true and fall into a fit of ecstasy, and really, who wouldn't want to see that?

Technology, Time Travel, and Blissful Ignorance

As one not-so-ancient myth goes, a commissioner at the US Patent Office declared around the turn of the 20th century that the patent office should be closed because everything that could possibly be invented, had.  While an absurd concept, the idea of a creative "plateau" sometime in the future of humanity does raise some interesting thoughts.  When I began to consider it, I naturally thought first about time travel.

Several hundred centuries after the first rockets were successfully used in Asia as a weapon in the fighting between China and Mongolia, but still a couple centuries before rocket propulsion was subjected to scientific study for use in transportation, the late 15th century ushered in the genius of the original Renaissance Man Leonardo da Vinci.  Though today we recognize the obvious benefits of rocket propulsion, in Leonardo's day two of the most advanced flight machines he envisioned were a hang glider and a helicopter that was little more than a chair attached to a giant corkscrew.  No powered transportation there.

Fast-forward two to three hundred years.  Inventors began engineering steam-powered external combustion engines that eventually became both catalysts for and staples of the Industrial Revolution, finding their way into mines, factories, locomotion, and the evolutionary field of electric power.  Some even toyed with the idea of an internal combustion engine that ran on liquid fuels such as gas, but toys is all they were.

Made possible by the Industrial Revolution, the budding automobile industry around the turn of the 20th century finally brought wild commercial success to those gas engines, which also happened to be on board the first powered airplane and several years later the helicopter (could Leonardo have imagined this?).  To this day internal combustion engines power many of our most impressive machines that don't use electricity, nuclear power, or rocket power which can finally fling stuff into outer space.

Once I wrapped up my foray into historical time travel, I wondered what it would be like to transport someone from any century since the Renaissance into any subsequent era.  I used to think that their reaction to the future would be "Of course! That seems so obvious I can't believe we didn't think of it before!"  But my, how wrong I think I was.

Simply put, I think transporting someone into the future would be a total mind-bender.  Just look at how confused your parents get when it comes to figuring out Facebook.  That is something a 7-year-old could master with no sweat, but imagine trying to explain "the cloud" to a brilliant mind like that of Thomas Edison, who lived just last century:

Modern person: "The 'cloud' is a group of intelligent electrical machines called computers that store your information remotely so you can access it instantly from anywhere in the world."
Edison: "What kind of information?"
"Stuff like your passwords, credit card numbers, and email addresses."
"What are those?"
"Passwords are electronic keys that allow you to verify your identity in a virtual world called the Internet. Credit card numbers allow merchants to take out instantaneous, paperless loans in your name for everyday purchases you make, so you don't have to exchange or convert physical money.  Email addresses are destinations in the virtual world where you can send an electronic letter, like a sophistocated telegraph that can transmit to any location you want."
"Wow.  So what's the Internet?"
"Something a politician claims he invented in the 1990s."
"O...K.... So how does it work?"
"It's like the interstate highway system.  You can get information like letters, movies like those on your kinescope, and recorded audio like that from your dictaphone from anywhere on the globe to anywhere else at the speed of light using electrical impulses and radio waves."
"Awesome!  What's the interstate highway system?"
"Something we built in the US in the 1960s after the second World War.  Germany had something called the Audubon that Adolf Hitler built as a high-speed road for automobiles and secretly doubled as an emergency landing strip for bomber planes in case their military bases were blown up."
"Airplanes are weapons now? We had another World War? I think I'm having a heart attack."

And so the future killed Thomas Edison.

While we're at it, why not try to explain a microwave oven to Isaac Newton?  I'm sure he'd pick up pretty quickly on atom theory, AC power, microprocessors, radio physics, and what buttons to press to get the cussed thing to turn on without burning his popcorn.

We live in an awesome age of technology, and can be rightly proud of the strides society has taken in the last couple of decades to improve health, communications, commerce, and the standards of living around the world.  Nevertheless, I think history has shown that we have a great track record for improving ourselves beyond our wildest dreams, and I am truly yet blindly excited to see what innovations we make in the decades to come.