Ok if you read the title, don't get me wrong.  I'm the coolest!  Right...

Long story short, I made a facebook profile, and there are all these little gadgets you can add to your page.  One of them is called "Pieces of Flair" which if you don't know is a reference to one of the great movies of all time, Office Space.  Basically, a waitress in the movie is supposed to wear lots of doo-dads on her uniform to show how motivated she is about her workplace.  The doodads are called "Flair." 

So on Facebook, "flair" comes in the form of buttons - you know - the kind you pin to things...like a hat or your shirt, and they have cutesy little messages or pictures.  On Facebook, you can create your own flair and send it to your friends.  So there are a LOT of "homegrown" flair on facebook.  Most of these homegrown variety are a great baseline for determining where the greater part of up and coming human beings lie in the intellectual food chain.  To save you the trouble of looking for yourself, I'll just tell you - it's sad.  Really really sad.  We, humanity, are in real trouble.  See "Idiocracy" on IMDB.com.

While going through the retardedly long list of flair that I might send to friends, I noticed things in the messages people created. It's something I noticed 20 years ago in high school, and it seems to be true - maybe even more true (is there such a thing?) now.  Being smart is not cool.  Being a moron makes you a rebel, and being a rebel is cool.  And because being smart is not cool, our next generation of kids, overwhelmingly, are retarded.  Really fucking stupid, people.  I'm not talking the difference between a math whiz kid and a B student.  I'm talking the difference between an accomplished scientist and a bucket of snot.

Meanwhile, it's common place to pay a guy millions of dollars to run full speed into another guy whose job is to be a brick wall.  That's "cool" in today's world.  Breaking your body repeatedly so some mouth breather has an excuse to eat lots of nachos and consume ludicrous quantities of beer.  It's commonplace to pay a guy a huge amount of money to get into a ring and try his best to beat the living shit out of a fellow human being.  Is it any wonder our society is as fucked up as it is?

Hey...I love sports, too.  To a degree.  But when society values speed and endurance over intelligence, I get a bit concerned.  Does society realize that speed and endurance isn't going to cure anything?  Build anything?  Invent anything?  Does anyone give a shit?

I'm to the point where I've washed my hands of it.  I turned 46 yesterday.  I may influence a few people here and there with my dedication to thought and BRAIN EXERCISE, but it's way too little, way too late.

I wonder if society is ever going to realize that everything that has ever had a positive impact on our collective quality of life was created by thinkers.  Or will we just tune in to some retarded television show and tune out the world?