Candid, Opinionated, and Otherwise Cynical Advice

1. If you want to stop kids from smoking, then stop kids from smoking. Yes, you can penalize cashiers…or…you could STOP KIDS FROM SMOKING. Slap them with fines, slap their parents with fines, patrol your local high school at break hour, and have kids nark on the adults who are buying them smokes (then fine them, too)…viola. Underage smoking is no longer an issue, and the government just saved about 75 billion dollars in health care costs down the road.

2. Stop listening to the Pope (we asked him to stop talking, and that didn’t quite work). Responsible consumerism can, and should, be applied to religion. If you’re tithing your local catholic church, you are supporting a pope who thinks condoms cause AIDS and that birth control is always wrong. Why is this man’s impeccable logic worthy of your attention? Stop listening, encourage others to do the same, and he becomes just another opinionated old guy yelling at young people from his porch.

3. It is impossible to Save a Life. We can delay death for a finite amount of time, but we can never actually save a life (e.g. if you performed CPR on someone and then they died in the ambulance…not saved. If you save a kid from drowning and he gets hit by a car while walking away…not really saved). It’s okay to want to delay death (for days, months, or even decades). But the medical system is fixated on a pursuit which is largely imaginary, and this concept takes away from the much more achievable goal of Improving Quality of Life during our finite time on this planet. (Apologies if this sounds anything like the excessively awful movie Patch Adams, which both decreased the quality of life of everyone who saw it, and brought us all a full two hours closer to death. Robin Williams should be tried for his crimes against humanity.)

4. If you want to save the world this Earth Day, try NOT recycling. Your cans and pop bottles are not the cause of the Earth's problems (and neither is that plastic bag you bought them in, though it might smother a sea turtle or two). Rampant consumerism and a societal attitude of convenience and complacency? A much more likely culprit. So throw away your pop bottles, and feel bad about it, and feel bad about the rest of your garbage, too (recycling causes a ton of greenhouse emissions, anyways). Feel bad about the meat you eat, and the bananas you eat, and...whatever else you eat. (I have limited knowledge of food products, as you may have noticed). Feel bad enough to change your lifestyle accordingly, even if it's not socially acceptable and/or easy. Recycling is easy. Saving the planet is not.

5. Play with a puppy under a cherry tree in full blossom. There should be sunshine, and possibly a book of poetry read by a handsome European without a shirt. There's no real reason why you should, but...just do it. It'll be fun.