"Here... We... GO!"

Yes, I am aware that phrase is most likely copyrighted. This is me, ceasing to care.

It is the specifics of the world that leaves people behind. For example, there is this wonderful thing in the written world called allusion. The general idea, in case you weren't familiar, is that if you reference anything that isn't yours in a work of fiction, poetry, or other general "nonsense," you are brilliant. This thing, strange and wonderful as it is, happens to be one of those things that just makes all of your high school papers "win."

Life, despite what you have been told, is not High School. That's right, that song by those guys and the internet have lied to you.

In any other endeavor not considered "nonsense," allusion is called by several other names. To list a few; Theft, Plagiarism, Being Unoriginal, Pirating... trust me, the list goes on.

There is one of our fatal mistakes in how we educate our children today. We educate them in generalities, and generalities are fatal in a society out for blood... or money from copyright infringement.

I understand how we can make this mistake, it's quite easy, actually. Most people do it to newborns. When a baby is just beginning to learn, one of the first things it learns is speech. The best way to teach a child to speak well is to speak well very often in this time period. The mistake most people make is to talk down to these children, stunting their language growth with "baby noises" and other such generalized ideas of language.

This is not all a bad thing, however. Another word for generalizations is Stereotypes. To a large number of people, namely the "politically correct" crowd, Stereotypes are akin to Satan. If you are one of those people, you should probably stop reading. This won't end well for you. The problem with educating with stereotypes is that not every situation fits the type. The problem with NOT educating with stereotypes is that the brain processes information with the types it has been given to work with. An intelligent person, when faced with a situation that they don't have a type for, makes a new type to fit the situation. This is not a bad thing, in fact, some people find it quite pleasurable to encounter something new and different. It's why people travel, meet new people, try to understand the complexities of individuals, mate, love, and come to anything close to wisdom in this life.

So, what is the problem here? The problem is that we're generalizing generalizations. yeah, lots of big words there, let's break it down, using an example. A man, we'll call him Edgar, writes a poem. The poem is really silly, and it's about some bells. The poem is so silly, in fact, that he invents some new words to go into it, you know, just to make stuff work out. Today, we have a generality that says "Stealing is bad," so Edgar sends his new words to the copyright office and has them all sealed away under his name. But there is this other guy, a high school kid at heart, who reads this poem thinks of another generality, "Allusion is Good." This guy, we'll call him Paul, writes another silly poem and borrows a few of Edgar's special words. He says, "hey, it's all just silliness, isn't it?" Edgar, however, applies his stereotype to this case, regardless of the generality that "Allusion is Good." Edgar files a lawsuit against Paul, looses, and proceeds to make it his mission to end Paul's career. What Edgar has done is generalize a generalization. He has taken a type, a rule his brain understands, and begins to apply that rule in all situations. Also, if you're a computer nut, you'd know that when this happens in software and hardware, we call them "Logic Faults," and it means something is wrong, broken, or worse.

What do we do about this problem? Well, I've been riffing on copyright for a while, so I'll use a different example. Let's use Jews. WONDERFUL STEREOTYPE, right there. It has almost become a taboo to even say the term. Why? The Holocaust, World War 2, White Supremacy, pick your poison. Still, the "Jew" stereotype is a wonderful stereotype.

Would you like to know a secret? Guess who gets the best kick out of stereotypical "Jew" jokes? INTELLIGENT JEWISH PEOPLE, that's who. The problem is when people generalize the rule that "making fun of people who are less fortunate than you is wrong" to include the "Jew" stereotype.

The Jewish community is a wonderful thing, however, and has come up with a solution to maintain their proud position as the butt of so many hilarious jokes. They started making fun of themselves.

A Jewish friend of mine once told me a joke about his grandfather. In all seriousness, he said that "grandfather died at Auschwitz." Then, privately, to his friends and people who knew him, said "he fell off a guard tower." For my friend, this little joke let him laugh at tragedy, at a horrific situation that never should have happened, that many people think of as impossible. With humor, with owning the mistake, he makes a new type, a new rule that lets him deal with the impossible, the horrible, and all the light that falls inside the darkness. It has let him grow.

There are other rules you can apply to situations like that, and you can grow from those too. The point here is to build up a list of generalizations, and how they go wrong, and how they go right.

Tell me how you feel, folks.