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Annoyed by proliferation of punditry

davefredman
June 24, 2011

I am a story teller not a motivational speaker. I have told tens of thousands of stories to classrooms of high school kids to illustrate points. I am in most of these stories and quite often I am not cast in an admirable or favorable light. The story ends when it’s over and not when some cheesy moral has be wrapped around it and stuck with a tooth pick like some life lesson wiener wink. Life is not like that, it’s more open ended and nonsensical not to mention unfair and unjust.

Young people are weary of stories told by people who have never made a mistake or claim to have overcome great hardships in their lives to become the deadly boring person they are as an adult.

I know as a blue chip athlete in football and basketball I have leg whipped pass rushers, delivered cheap shot forearms to the face to teammates who were rocking the “dummy hero” card in a no contact practice session.

I have been a slacker and fabricator of excuses and I’m pretty sure I once faked a concussion to get out of a college game because I just didn’t feel like playing anymore.

I have stood on principles that were my own following the advice of Grand Mom’s Rose, “Never follow the crowd especially if they’re going to war.”

In the current climate I am annoyed by the proliferation of punditry and expertise spouted out by individuals who haven’t laid down any track whatsoever. There was an expression in my old North Philadelphia neighborhood “Who the hell did you ever beat?”

What that means is “just shut up and quit talking about yourself or acting like you know something which you don’t.”

This is the transition zone of the essay where I spin the orb of wisdom away for the dark side of the non rotating planet that symbolizes my life to bask in the brightness of all the good things I have done. Perhaps my greatest asset is I will get up off my mistakes and admit to being flawed; I tell stories with the embedded message “be better than I was” because in retrospect what is funny now didn’t produce much laughter when it happened.

 

 

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