I saw this tweet posted online and everyone was chiming in about trans this and trans that but seemed to miss the entire point.
The GOP has decried "participation trophies" as a talisman of leftist thinking - that "everyone wins" and the next generation is being rewarded for just showing up. This is setting expectations that just showing up is all you need do, and thus setting up the next generation for failure. And maybe there is a nugget of truth to that.
So I laughed out loud when this REPUBLICAN State Senator complained about "missing her grandchild's preschool graduation."
Graduating? From a school that, by definition, is not school at all, but preparation for school? Why on earth would anyone celebrate this? You don't graduate from preschool, you age out of it. It is physically impossible to flunk preschool, and thus you cannot celebrate a "graduation" from it. It is not a milestone in life - and certainly not one worth celebrating.
Likely, any "graduation" ceremony would be bewildering to the kids. Half of them would toss off the mortarboards the moment they were put on their heads. About a quarter would be wetting themselves, and there is always one kid shucking his clothes and running around in his underwear, screaming. Yes, that is what 4-year-olds do.
Graduating from preschool - sheesh!
I never had a "graduation" ceremony from preschool simply because I never went to one. I went to Kindergarten when I was five years old, and no, no one had a "graduation" from Kindergarten. In fact, it was only a half-day class.
Ditto for all other grades - no "graduation" from fourth, six, eighth, or any other grade, other than leaving high school. And quite frankly, I could have skipped that. I never went to my college graduation - Syracuse University puts thousands of graduates in the Carrier dome and they spray cheap Korbel "Champagne" all over each other as each major is graduated en masse. I did go to law school graduation, but in retrospect, it was also a waste of time. The keynote speaker was Dick Cheney or some such Republican nonsense.
I guess I am shocked - shocked, I say! - at the hypocrisy of Republicans. They spent the last decade lambasting liberals for "participation trophies" and here we have a Republican politicians whining about missing her grandson's graduation from preschool as if he was graduating summa cum laude from Harvard Medical School. Let me guarantee you that this kid won't remember that fateful day when Grandma failed to show at one of his pivotal life events - no doubt it will be all downhill from here. He will end up as a homeless crack addict as Me-Ma-Ma did a no-show at pre-K grad.
Make me puke!
I weep for the Republican Party as it used to be a party of policies and had some internal consistency in the positions it took - lower deficit, lower taxes, less government, and less government spending. But somewhere along the way, they found that voters were bored by all of that - and what's more, their cronies wanted more government spending and deficit spending to boot - provided that the government largess is sent their way. It is no mystery why Elon Musk turned Republican - all of his companies are suckling at the government teat and he wants to be first in line come milking time.
Speaking of which, did you notice Jeff Bezo's Blue Origin was awarded a contract for a lunar lander? Apparently NASA is skeptical that Musk's big stainless steel aerial bomb is capable of landing on the moon. It seems that the only thing the "Starship" is good at doing is destroying launch pads and blowing up into tiny bits - again and again. The whole concept of building a rocket that looks like, and uses the technology of, 1930's Science Fiction, seems a little weird. So maybe NASA is hedging its bets with a more conventional lander. But I digress.
The new GOP seems more interested in grandstanding on social issues and "owning the libs" and whatnot. Part and parcel of this was a decades-long mocking campaign designed to ridicule the left. And front and center of this was "participation trophies" which - to the extent they were actually real - were a stupid idea. So was Ebonics, but that turned out to be a non-issue and an obscure idea practiced by a few scattered individuals. You don't hear much about it anymore, doya?
And so it goes with "participation trophies" - once a staple of Fox News Lampooning, it has apparently gone mainstream along with "gender reveal parties" and other atrocities of this new Century.
So, give it a decade or so. If the GOP can embrace participation trophies and preschool graduation ceremonious, they will probably embrace the whole "trans" thing in short order. Hey, after all, the most famous "trans" person is, in fact, a Republican.
They're already halfway there.
