Dear Graduating Class of 2018

Another school year ends, another commencement-style address begins:

To the college graduates of 2018:

Are you paying attention?

Not to me, not to any words of wisdom you might get from thousands of different college commencement address speakers.  Are you paying attention to what's going on in America?  To what's going on in the world?

Paying attention to civilization is the most important thing you should be doing now.  I know, it wasn't your strong suit the past several years.  You did enough to get your degree, but listening to long, boring lectures doesn't lend itself to paying attention.  For anyone.

If paying attention hasn't been your thing the past four (five? six?) years, it needs to be now.  Bad stuff is happening.  Stuff that has the potential to make your future miserable.  I'm not just referring to your job future, but your future of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Through a mixture of inattentiveness, conniver-y, and outright lying, certain individuals have been given power that far exceeds their ethical and moral capacity to handle it.  This has led to them placing other ethically- and morally- challenged people in powerful posts.

The not-so-surprising result is a government that isn't actually working for the people.  It's only working for, well, let's just say your chances of success are currently for less dependent on whether you have a college degree and for more on whether you are a white, heterosexual, Christian male.

Are you paying attention now?

The way to fix our broken government is to know what's going on.  The best way to know what's going on is to stay abreast of current events, and I don't mean by keeping up with your Instagram or Twitter feeds.  That isn't nearly good enough.

Watch the news, nationally and locally, and preferably on more than one channel.  Read a bunch of different papers, articles, and books.  Talk to a lot of people, and not just to your friends, who probably already think the same way as you do, or they wouldn't be your friends.

Show a little bit of passion for having a government and political system that works the right way, under the rule of law  -- after all, you're paying for it, even if you don't have a job.  Then, when election day rolls around, vote.

Pay attention!

Oh, and congratulations.

LieSpotting

I recently watched a most popular TED talk with the same title as this post.  Roughly the first half was about how often people lie, while the last half was about how to spot those lies.

I was more interested in the first half, because it verified my somewhat cynical belief that most people lie, and lie often, when they talk to you about something.  Many of these are of the 'little white lie' variety, the kind you tell to make someone else feel better, or to maintain a social grace.

However, a lot of these lies are exaggerations, to make the liar look better than he or she really is.  Some of these are couples/relationship type of lies, but the ones I'm referring to come from the stories that others tell about something they did.  You know the ones -- so-and-so did something crazy, or saw something crazy, and the story gets crazier (and a little bit different) every time you hear it.

Of course, this type of lying is common among pre-teens and teens, where it's almost a rite of passage.  In the past I've suggested you should only believe 75% of half of what they say!

But I feel like it happens more often these days with adults.  It's as if baby-boomers are in a contest among themselves to better whatever another person says.  Like the Dilbert character Topper, except not always in an office environment.

In this context, I suppose it's harmless.  It's isn't like I'm going going to make a bad decision based on this inaccurate information.  It just isn't good form.