By ROBIN SHOEMAKER

So while our country’s ship sinks under the weight of unsustainable debt, irresponsible spending and money-printing, I am thinking, “Why not burn the ship while it’s sinking?” Here are some ideas to get some fires started:

Elect stupid people. 

I don’t mean people with whom I disagree (name-calling). I mean people are aren’t very smart. You know, low IQ, a little slow, not much going on upstairs. These people should not have the brainpower to understand philosophy or how laws reflect a society’s moral standing (or decay).  

I want people who don’t think about the long-term consequences of deviating from our founders’ understanding of human nature: people who are not well educated in history, the Constitution, or the Federalist Papers. I don’t want them to know about the world’s prior attempts at communism, why a state turns fascist, or what happens to a country when it starts printing money. 

I want representatives who are not critical thinkers. They should blindly follow the opinions of a few smart people and not question their motives or correctness. (That way we can get just a few people controlling a large Congressional voting block.) 

Whatever new idea comes their way, these people must think that it is an improvement on what has come before, simply because it’s new.

Get rid of standards. 

Give every participant a trophy. Eliminate winning and losing. Stop expecting our children to grow up and our adults to be responsible for themselves.  If we can lower our standards, we can eliminate excellence. “Good enough” will do.

Standards are hurtful, you know. They make a person feel bad if he doesn’t live up to them. We don’t want anybody to feel bad. If we crush a person’s self-esteem by telling him that his work isn’t good enough, well, he will never recover. And then we’ll feel bad too. 

A person’s feelings are way more important than the truth. A person shouldn’t have to learn and improve himself; it is our responsibility to make him feel good about his capabilities no matter how he performs.

Also, let’s give students As and Bs. Bad grades can scar a kid for life, you know. We’ve got to make our students FEEL like they are capable before they can BE capable. We should send the message to them, “You are good enough, just the way your are” so they don’t have to worry about improving themselves or their skills. They can be HAPPY in their mediocrity.

Stop offending people.

Again, we must avoid hurting people at all costs. We are responsible for how another person feels. I think I’ve already established that it is up to the rest of us to maintain each person’s self-esteem.  We want everybody to feel included and accepted. The goal here is not to find confidence in ourselves, but in others.  

If we can stop offending people, we can hide all of the bigoted and nasty people because they’ll censor everything they want to say before they say it. 

Also, edicts against offending people will go a long way toward shutting up people who don’t see things the way we do.  Nobody likes to be disagreed with (especially by offensive people). If you let others disagree with you, you have to come up with cogent arguments to defend your point of view and how difficult is that!

Eliminate right and wrong.

The best conflagration that we can light is to eliminate this whole “right and wrong” thing. Do you realize how judgmental that is? We have no right to judge other people! It’s hurtful and makes us look superior. 

We are responsible for how other people feel about themselves, remember? We can’t risk their morale by telling them that they’re doing something wrong. I don’t know what would happen, but I’m quite certain it would be bad.

If we can just eliminate “wrong” altogether, then anything goes. We can be free to be as profligate and promiscuous as we want and feel no guilt about it. Nobody can tell us that we’re damaging other people, our society, the future, blah, blah....

If there is no wrong, we will have to ignore the consequences that come from behaving against nature’s laws. Or, better yet, we will blame those consequences on the offensive people. 

We can stop being so hung up on truth. Truth is the opposite of lies. We don’t have to trust one another to make a society work or to find real happiness.  

So here’s to burning the ship while it sinks!  

It will make for a spectacular sight for the rest of the world. We can be that shining beacon once again (well, for a very limited period of time anyway). 

Our country is going down in a sea of IOUs and worthless dollars. Let’s make the most of the time we have left by living only for the moment and making everybody feel good about themselves and free of guilt.

By lighting all of these fires, there will be no fragments of the once-mighty ship left.

After it is under the surface and out of sight, there will be nothing, thankfully, on which to float and be rescued.

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Robin Shoemaker lives in Asheville and holds a bachelor’s of science degree in accounting from Clemson University.