Humor – What We Need More Of Is Explosions

Maybe you’ve heard something in the news about American kids having the intelligence of a sack of lobotomized geese. This is an unfair statement. A lobotomized goose can still be trained to make the median score on the SAT. Sadly enough, our kids are getting dumber and dumber, especially compared to the rest of the world.

Especially Japan. Every other day there’s a new story about some Japanese prodigy who’s built a robot that can play baseball or who’s developed a vaccine that cures cancer and leaves the patient with a minty-fresh smell. Meanwhile, Average Bobby Johnson just spent an hour watching skateboarding accidents on YouTube and is figuring out a way into Everyday Sally’s jeans. A noble pursuit, but not one that sets Bobby up for much of a future. Especially if he figures it out.

It’s popular to blame the schools. They’ve been likened to teenage daycares, where just getting through the day is more important than learning anything. That would be a valuable life lesson, but no, schools actually try to cram something into students’ heads. No, I don’t blame the schools, but the parents. They’re just not willing to let their kids try killing themselves.

I had a chemistry set growing up. There were a hundred little white plastic bottles with cryptic names like “phenolphthalein” and “hydrochloric acid”. I had a little alcohol burner so I could heat various mixtures and set ants on fire. I had a tiny plastic beaker, safety glasses that fell off my face when I wasn’t holding them on and one pair of latex gloves that broke the first time I put them on. I’m sure there were instructions, but I probably threw them out when I opened the box on Christmas morning.

I was a highly-trained scientist, even at that early age. I applied the scientific method in all of my experiments, mixing everything I could in that tiny beaker until I saw something cool. When nothing happened, I heated it on the burner. Just to make sure the experiment was a total failure, I gave the mixture to the dog to see if he developed super powers. He did manage to projectile vomit on the ceiling once, so I had a mitigated success. One time, I made a green cloud of gas that made me sneeze blood for a week. It was awesome.

I spent all of Christmas break mixing, heating and feeding until I ran out of chemicals. Mom wouldn’t let me use anything under the sink, so my career as a chemist ended until I got to high school and found high-grade chemicals to mix. But that one special break with those chemicals set me down a lifetime of fulfillment and hazardous materials. I always wanted to see something even cooler than what I saw last time.

Let kids have that chance. Let them see just what they can mix, or build, or hook up a nine-volt battery to. Being ostracized in high school is a small price to pay for a rewarding career in science. Parents, let your kids try to kill themselves, for science.

Who knows? They may get lucky.

Tagged as: humor