The American Library Association’s Banned Books Week.
How will you celebrate your freedom to read?
Read a banned book.
They can stop saying them, but it doesn’t make it less true.
Cracked.com often veers into oppressive territory, but I thought this particular piece was very insightful:
What They Think They’re Saying:
“I’m not Paris Hilton! I work 70-hour weeks to make this salary!”
What We Hear:
“The only reason I have a hundred times more money than you is because I work a hundred times as hard!”
This will be the entry that prompts many a reader to skip right to the comment section after only reading the entry header (“I’m tired of these hippies saying the rich just got lucky and don’t work hard!”). So let’s get this out off the way right now, and make them look like assholes for not reading far enough:
Most high-income earners do put in a ton of hours. Bill Gates seemed to never sleep (an employee once said that putting in 81 hours in four days still couldn’t keep up with Gates’ schedule). So yes, it’s unfair that we tend to think that “being rich” means “lounging by the pool while an albino tiger massages our feet with his tongue.” So, “Hey, I work hard for what I have!” is perfectly true. It’s also insulting.
(Getty Images)
“You guys just need to work hard in a lucrative field.”It’s insulting for the exact same reason “Hey, I love my country!” is insulting: It implies that the listener doesn’t. Otherwise there’d be no reason to say it.
It implies a bizarre alternate reality where society rewards you purely based on how much effort you exert, rather than according to how well your specific talents fit in with the needs of the marketplace in the particular era and part of the world in which you were born. It implies that the great investment banker makes 10 times more than a great nurse only because the banker works 10 times as hard.
He doesn’t.
