You Can't Pick Your Family

...but you can pick your friends and ignore your crazy neighbor lady when she goes off her meds and has a melt-down worthy of any spoiled five year daughter right in your front yard while you're trying to talk to a civil engineer about the heavy rain and the necessary construction of a swale (better known as a drainage ditch around this area).


Why do otherwise intelligent, erudite people produce dysfunctional ill-tempered idiots?  My cousin HappyFlute has a husband, Gong, and two children whom we'll call WisedUp and VillageIdiot.  Somewhere in the background is Gong's grandmother, a fiendishly wealthy inscrutable oriental who, it seems, believes in standing on your own two feet once you've learned to walk.

HappyFlute and Gong like outdoor activities.  Hunting, fishing, eating what they shoot.  They have a survival skill set and both are completely comfortable living outdoors.  Other than that, Gong is a rocket scientist (literally) and makes the big bucks.  HappyFlute teaches art or something at public school, and knows full well that she has a decent lifestyle because of Gong. 

Gong's grandmother paid for a college education for both kids.  WisedUp decided on pre-med (because grandmother said she'd pay for med school and never batted an eye - yeah, that kind of money), then she decided on something else, then she graduated with a degree in primitive cultures.  Or something.  The she discovered that the demand for someone with her particular talents was good, but the pay sucked pond scum.  So she went to a technical school for six months and got a degree / training in Information Systems.  She writes code for a living, makes better bread than most, and lives five minutes from work.  She's happy.  VillageIdiot got a degree in teaching music; he will eventually teach music in public school.  He was warned repeatedly that it didn't pay much, and that he was not going to live in his parents' home forever.  He's generally resentful because, according to him, the rest of the world owes him something more than he has.  His friends as well, because they have student loan debt that isn't being forgiven, which it should be, and on and on and on.  This all started when President Trump was elected President.

So me, not being able to just sit back and shut the fuck up, would occasionally react badly to the predigested drivel that VillageIdiot posted on his FaceBook page.  Recently I remarked that all I ever saw him do was post the opinionated rubbish created by the Democrat marketing firm, and that it would be a nice change if he posted his own ideas.

Which set him off.

The short of it is that I, and I know this will be hard to believe, but I, Mad Jack, was attacked by a pack of three SJWs led by the VillageIdiot, and I successfully restrained myself from verbally eviscerating them.  But in the process I did find out something interesting: None of these fools can write.

By that I mean that none of them can produce a grammatically correct sentence, or string together a few sentences to form a coherent paragraph.  Putting their other fine qualities aside, they are all graduates of the University of Colorado, and none of them can write beyond a Junior High level.

Reading between the lines, just the suggestion that VillageIdiot write a missive or two about anything caused him a panic attack.

Since VillageIdiot is a music major (College of Education), I suggested he compose something and put it out on YouTube for the rest of the world to enjoy.  That set him off again, and in a final snit he unfriended me and blocked me.  Poor me.  They're probably laughing and trading insults about me right now.  It's enough to drive someone to drink, and in just a few minutes I'm going to have a nice Martini.

My real worry here is not what happens to the VillageIdiot in the near future.  My concern is that we, the United States, have high school graduates who are functionally illiterate.  We now have college graduates who are borderline illiterate.

When my parents graduated from college, the idea that someone could get a bachelor's degree without being able to compose a paper was laughable.  Now?  It's a reality, and in a truly Olympian leap to conclusions I would say that anyone who can't write will have a very low reading comprehension - and these people vote.

Well, thanks for reading.  Here's how!