Above My Pay Grade

Most of my life, I have been told to “let it go” or to “practice acceptance”. Some things are just the way they are; I ‘can’t fix it, change it or influence it’. I’m wasting time and energy on things outside of my control. (Yes, you probably did utter one of these phrases to me at least once before).

This may very well be true; however, I’m not comfortable throwing my hands in the air and going the opposite way of my own moral compass.

It has been sanctioned, “a win is a win”, and “passing is not failing”, but the facts remain, an A is still better than a D. We continue to underachieve to a point that somehow, “fuck it, good enough” has become the common goal that we set for ourselves to reach.

I can’t see hating someone I never met, believing in something I haven’t witnessed, or selling something I haven’t tried, but that’s my choice. I’m not suggesting anyone follow my lead. Perhaps knowing our own limits is half the battle. How low are you willing to go? Be honest with yourself when answering the following:

1. Do you have standards or will you settle for anything that works in the moment?
2. Do you encourage yourself to learn new things or would you rather get told about things from someone else’s angle?
3. Do you read about current events, foreign relations, international news, or science from reputable sources, or do you just skim over headlines in social media before you react?

I’ve found many people are exhausted, they don’t know what to believe or which way to turn, who to believe. Opposed to the idea of trust, people are emotionally drained… subjugated, too tired to read or even to think. This struggle is real; we are intellectually, beat-down… Life is spinning in so many directions at once, we can’t stand still and when we try to catch up, we fall down. 

When we open our eyes, our real is so overwhelmingly surreal; our industrious minds are struggling to conceptualize the time passed, as we often feel its impact in miles per hour.

It just doesn’t make sense. Such a defiant society it is; doing the exact opposite of what we were taught. We strive to have no responsibility, but yearn to feel needed. We want to be credited and compensated for a positive outcome, but claim zero accountability for our behaviors’ negative effects. We compare ourselves to [what little we know, but think we see in] others. Still, with the fiercest entitlement, we expect that we can gain something great for doing absolutely nothing good.

The harsh reality is that we can’t have it both ways. We certainly aren’t doing America any favors by paraphrasing a catchy social media headline, taking the pulpit, and spewing forth our misguided opinions. If we wish to have information fed to us, we need to demand the information come from all sides. If we aren’t interested in hearing or seeing the information from other sides, we need to learn to have no opinion and practice some restraint, because without those facts, we have exactly nothing to offer.

This foolishness has been proved to be above much of the nation’s pay-grade, and clearly a job for the President.