A Nation of Pussies

This was the first official "RANT" I ever wrote and luckily it still holds pretty true. I wrote it when I was living in Japan and had a lot of free time and was rather upset with things (you'll notice, if you continue to read these beyond this first one, that most of my rants from that era are pretty angry, but they do have a point, I promise). I don't remember what prompted this particular rant, probably some news item I read on the internet, but I wrote this and put it out there for the whole world to see and enough people saw it and liked it for me to keep writing. At the time, I didn't know I was "blogging." I was just ranting and doing it on the internet in the vain hopes that someone would read my stuff -- as it turns out I was ahead of the curve there. Did I get any credit forging a cultural revolution and changing the look of the internet forever by creating a new format in which people could air their grievances? Oh no, I was so far ahead of the curve that people couldn't even see where I was.
Anyway, I'm getting off on a completely different rant here, so I'll get back to the topic at hand, and that is "A Nation of Pussies." Enjoy.

When did we turn into a nation of pussies?
Let’s be completely frank here, folks. Long gone are the days when men were real men and women were tough as nails while still being soft and huggable at the same time. My mom raised two kids by herself, working full-time jobs over an hour away from home, and somehow she still found out about all the shit we pulled when she wasn’t around and made us pay for it.
And pay for it we did. Extra chores or a simple spanking, either bare-handed or with the old favorite, the wooden spoon. And after the beating, we went to our rooms to clean them, and it had better get done proper that time ‘cause Mom was sick of telling us to do it every damn day.
We, as a nation, have gone from John Wayne to DJ Qualls. All due respect to DJ Qualls, he’s a great actor with superb comedic timing, but I remember a time (fading as it was) when I was a kid when we’d have kicked the shit out of the DJ Qualls we knew, taken his lunch money, and given him a wedgie for good measure.
We didn’t have therapy, self-help, or play-dates. We damn well went outside and played. If we didn’t make the team or were kicked out of class for goofing off or making fart-noises when we should have been doing algebra, our parents told us to suck it up and deal with it (and after the call from the school, we more than likely got another beating and were sent to clean our rooms... again). We weren’t called “special” when I was a kid, we were called “stupid” or “fidgety” or something else that nailed the problem on the head. We knew what was expected of us because we were told countless times by our parents the simple rules of life;
Take responsibility for your own actions
Clean up after yourself
That’s pretty much all you need to know. You do something wrong, own up to it, take your lumps, then shut the hell up about it. If you make a mess, clean it up. Nobody else on this planet was put here to clean up after anybody else, not even your mother. Either stop making so many damn messes everywhere, or clean them the hell up.
It sickens me nowadays to hear all the rules that are imposed on kids. The special rules so that all kids feel worthy and good. Where has all of this nurturing gotten us? Scholastic achievement in school is at an all-time low because the retarded kid who eats paste for quarters got a better grade on his English test than I did because he’s “special” and we shouldn’t make him feel like a failure. How is readjusting scores supposed to make the actually smart kids feel? If anything we’re teaching our kids that it’s ok to give up early and simply not give a damn, because we’ll fix it so that they’ll still do just as well as anybody else.
I shudder to think of what will happen when they get into the real world and want a job. Actually, it’s not too scary a thought... If anybody refuses a job to anybody I’m sure that they can contact any number of special-interest/special-rights groups to say it’s a case of discrimination and then the retarded kid is eating paste in a multi-billion dollar company while I, who went to college, studied, played by the rules and worked my ass off, is doing minimum-wage work at a goddamned Radio Shack.
But you know what? While I was working at Radio Shack, I didn’t complain about it. I knew that there were bills to pay, food to buy and eat, rent to pay, responsibilities to be taken care of. Yeah, I bitched about the low wages and shitty management, but I damn well stayed at that job for two years because I was taught to take care of myself. And when the time came for me to move up in the world, I damn well made it happen for myself. I didn’t ask anybody to do it for me, I didn’t demand anything more than I was willing to go out and work for myself.
You know what? I got it, too.
You know what I like best about DJ Qualls? His movie “The New Guy.” In that movie he did what the US, collectively, needs to do. Stop taking the shit we’ve been force-fed and lead to believe is simply “the way it is,” take charge of our own lives and damn well get out there, kick ass, take names, get laid, and go home.
We, as a nation, have gone from FDR telling us that the only thing to fear is fear itself, to Al Gore showing us the biggest pussy display since Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. Did anybody at home, other than me and Michael Moore, watch the presidential-candidate debates of 2000 and wonder who the fuck was up there whining and pussy-footing his way around questions while Bush (yet another pussy... Just look at his name, for god’s sake) said what he’d always said and got away with it?
FDR took a country that was at it’s absolute lowest and turned it into the strongest nation on the planet. Somewhere between about 1957 and now we’ve stopped worshipping guys like John Wayne and Joe Dimaggio and placated ourselves with guys like Freddie Prinze Jr. and Alexander Rodriguez. First off, actors should have two names. Their first and their last. Anybody who tries to look cool or accentuate themselves by adding needless tag-ons or middle initials is just looking for attention, and the only attention they deserve is to be punched in the throat. Also, sports players... I refuse to call them “stars” because stars serve useful purposes in providing heat and light to the universe, and sports players get paid more money than God to run around and play, something that we, as Americans, used to do for free when we were kids. Sports players whine and complain about a salary cap and money and they actually have the gall to walk-out of a season and/or go on strike. Please. There’s nothing more pathetic than a man with a 6-figure income trying to garner support for his desire to make more money for doing less work than the guy who collects my trash every week.
That’s another big question I have... When did wages cease to have relevance to the actual work done? Corporate CEOs sit on their asses 90% of the time, only getting up to either fondle a secretary’s ass or to lay off more American workers and move the plants/factories to either Mexico or Taiwan where they can pay Pepe or Sing-liu ten cents an hour for what they’d have to pay Americans ten dollars an hour. Yet somehow, these fat cats with their business accounts and private jets and tax-writeoffs and tax-breaks earn more money than most of the people in the city they live in... Collectively.
What happened to the America that we were all told waited for us if we worked hard, played fair and took care of ourselves? We flat-out DON’T take care of ourselves. The government is looking to start wars (fights) all over the globe in some mythological quest for “peace,” and all the while they’re ignoring their own people. What kind of government is that? I’ve seen examples of government like that before, but I didn’t quite get the full gist of the program because it was all in Arabic.
When did the goverment decide that other nations’ people living in squalor were more important that the 80% of children in America who live below the poverty line? Personally, I’m beginning to think that the nightly news is the funniest damn show on TV and Comedy Central should try to incorporate it into their nightly lineup. All I can do is laugh when I see any politician rant and rave about how we have to help these poor defenseless foriegners, and then in the same breath say that we have to cut welfare out of the budget, make abortions illegal across the board, cancel any school-lunch programs, cut more schools and libraries out of the budget, AND THEN go on to say how we should give more tax-breaks to big businesses so they can move their corporate headquarters to the Cayman Islands so they can then avoid paying taxes altogether.
Ok. I’ve gone enough places and pissed off enough people for one rant. I’ll be sure to piss off more people next time, I’m sure.

--Brian