The Habitual Howling Hierarchy

January 18, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“I have nothing to complain about!” Melissa yelled as if volume made her grievance more grievous. She was employing irony, and she was winning! Complaining is what Melissa did. It’s what we all did, and if you wanted in you had to learn how to complain about something, even if that something involved the crushing burden of having nothing to complain about.

Our complaints often had something to do with the inhuman monolithic corporation we worked for that didn’t pay us enough, offer us enough benefits, or care that we were trapped behind a computer for ten hours a day, four days a week. Those of us in the inner circle of our inner circle learned to cycle out and complain about everything. There was no regular menu of complaints from which to choose, and there were no specials of the day. Complaining was just what we did.

“Complaints are like orifices,” Brian said to try to ingratiate himself with the group, through ironic, observational humor that matched Melissa’s. “Everyone’s got them, but we complain about not having more.” Unfortunate to Brian’s legacy, his little joke didn’t land, because we had an unspoken rule that we don’t complain about complainers, until we’re complaining about their constant complaints behind their backs.

Complaining is such a vital component of our being that it’s just something we do. We complain about how bored we are in the beginning, we complain about school, the workplace, and in our final decades on Earth, we complain about our lack of health, until it goes away.

If there is an afterlife, and we are introduced to absolute, unquestionable paradise, we will probably be blown away by it, initially, but we’ll get used to it after a while, and we’ll find something to complain about. “Have you noticed that they provide Black Duck umbrella picks for our cocktails here? I hate to complain, but it’s just such a huge step down from the OGGI cocktail umbrellas to which I was accustomed.”

If we have nothing to complain about, our brain will make something up just to justify its existence.

How often do we think just to avoid boredom, and thinking about how to complain about something is far more interesting than realizing how good we have it. Thinking about how good we have it kind of defeats the whole purpose of thinking.

“That sounds like first world thinking.” It is, but I’m guessing that there are plenty of third-world citizens who complain about stupid stuff too.

*******

My friends’ parents enjoyed complained about the state’s college football team, until the team started winning. At that point, they complained about having nothing to complain about. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were all complaining about a college football team that proved to be one of the most successful programs for that span of time. Our complaint was that our team didn’t win the national championship every year.

His parents did this, my dad did it, and we all grew up complaining about it. “We were so close!” we’d complain. “I’d rather finish 0-fer than get that close again,” was our common complaint. Their complaints were so unrealistic they were funny. I laughed at them from afar, but I also laughed at them from above, as I considered some of their complaints so foolish, until I watched my son’s second grade baseball team.

When those seven-eight-year-old children played baseball, they made errors, and I had to stifle my snarky comments. “Of course he didn’t catch that ball,” I thought, “not when it was coming right at him, and it could’ve won the game for us.” I will provide this space right here ( ) for you to criticize me, slam on me, and analyze the deficits of my character. I deserve it, but I just could not click that hyper-critical, “I could do better. Even at their age, I wouldn’t have done that” portion of my brain off. I wouldn’t have done better, and I knew it, but I couldn’t tell me that, not in the moment.

We’ve all seen videos of parents overreacting saying such stupid things at their child’s game, and what we see probably isn’t even one one millionth of the times it’s happened. We’ve all seen those viral videos of parents screaming their heads off over the dumbest things, and we found them disgusting, sad, and hilarious. And I would’ve agreed with every single one of your characterizations of these people, until I became one of them. I didn’t unleash any of these thoughts, and to my mind no one knew how unreasonable and unfair I was, but those thoughts were in there, percolating their way to the top.

I could take a couple of errors here and there, as I wasn’t so demanding of perfection that I ignited over every single error, but there was always that one error, that over-the-top error, that just broke the dam for me. I’d leap to my feet and take my dog for a walk to get as far away as I could from everyone. I didn’t want anyone knowing what I was thinking.

All I can say, in my defense, is I’ve been watching sports and screaming things at TVs for as long as I can remember. I learned that we fans don’t have to sit quietly in the comfort of our own home when athletes are engaging in inferior play. I took those unfair and unrealistic expectations of college-aged images on TV to seven and eight-year-olds trying to play baseball. I never said anything aloud, and I knew my thoughts were unrealistic, unfair, and obnoxious, but I couldn’t stop thinking them after all those years of conditioning.

When our favorite college football team actually started to win so often that they won three national championships in four years, my friend’s family didn’t celebrate our victory, they were bored. Bored? Yes, bored by all that success. I knew this mentality so intimately that shortly after the Cubs won the World Series, I warned my friend, “This is really going to put a dent in your favorite team’s fan base.” Why? “Because the Cubs were lovable losers, and Cubs’ fans enjoyed complaining about them year after year. Every Cub’s fan could recite the rolodex of reasons why their beloved team hadn’t won a World Series for 100 years. The Cubs actually winning the World Series will turn out to be a poor business decision on their part. You watch.” I turned out to be wrong by a matter of degrees. Most Cubs’ fans are still loyal, more loyal than I thought they’d be, but they lack the fanatical fervor that the complaints about them not winning once fueled.

When our favorite college football team finally beat our inter-conference rival in resounding fashion, I celebrated each touchdown as if it was the first in a very tight ball game.

“Why are you still cheering this game on?” my friend’s dad asked. “It’s a blowout.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “But it might have something to do with all the pain they’ve caused us for decades. It feels like it’s finally over.”

“It’s still a blowout,” he said. “It’s a boring game.” It took me a long time to realize if this guy couldn’t complain about a game, he wasn’t all that interested in watching it. That victory was so complete that he didn’t have anything to complain about, and he basically had no reason to watch it anymore.

If I were to dig far too deep into this superficial element of life, I might say that complaining about sports so much that we’re screaming at the images on TV, and becoming so irrational about something we cannot control, is actually quite healthy in that it provides a non-confrontational outlet to unleash our anger and frustrations in life, as long as we don’t take it out of the home and into the public realm at our seven-to-eight-year-old’s baseball game.

*******

“You can change his name if you want, and I won’t be offended,” a breeder said after I drove nine hours to pick up the puppy I just purchased from her. I was so sure she was being sarcastic that I said:

“Well thanks, that’s awful nice of you to allow me to name my dog?” in a tone I considered equally sarcastic. The breeder gave me a look to suggest our connections weren’t connecting.

“Wait, do people actually keep the name you choose for the pets they purchase from you?” I asked her. She said she didn’t know, but she wanted us to feel free to change it.

I already had that eight-week-old puppy’s name picked out. I knew the name the breeder chose, as she listed it in the online listing, but I never even considered the idea that she might be offended by the idea that I would change it. She lived nine hours away, so we would never see her again. How and why would she be offended by this, and why and how would I care if she was?

When we purchase a puppy, we plan on keeping it for 12-14 years. Why would anyone want to keep the name someone else chose for it? That is so foreign to my way of thinking that I just thought everyone but the rare exception changed the name. I was shocked to learn how wrong I was. Since that interaction with the breeder, I began asking my fellow pet owners how they arrived at their dog’s name, “How did you pick that name, I like it?” I’d ask in the most polite frame I could.

A surprising number of people said, “It was their name when we purchased them.”

“You know you can change it right?” I asked. “Do you know how surprisingly simple it is?” Dog lovers know that dogs have unique personalities, but do they know that those personalities are not tied to their name? If we were to try to change a human’s name, say when they’re twelve-years-old, that would be a complicated procedure that would confuse the kid so much that we wouldn’t even think of doing it, except in rare cases.

Dogs don’t cling to names the way humans do. They adapt so quickly that a name change can be accomplished quickly. We did it in about two days with that puppy we purchased from that breeder, and it took about a week for the eight-year-old dog we purchased a year before.

“I know, I know…” my fellow pet owners said when I told them how easy it was to change a dog’s name. Some tried to explain why they felt the need to keep the name, but most just left it at “I know, I know…”

I don’t know if people lack creativity, if they don’t want the hassle of being creative, or if they fear they won’t be able to successfully change their pet’s name, but I met a family who purchased a rabbit and kept that rabbit’s name. “Does a rabbit even come to you when you call it?” I asked within my ‘Why didn’t you just change its name?’ frame.

“It does,” they said after debating among themselves. “But only when it wants to. He doesn’t come to you every single time you call him, as a dog would.” That debate involved family members who didn’t want to concede to the uncomfortable theme of my question that rabbits aren’t intelligent enough to know the difference.

“So, why didn’t you change the name?”

They never answered with thorough and complete conviction, but they did try to convince me that their rabbit was far more intelligent than I knew, which I interpreted to mean that they didn’t want to insult the beloved Binky the Bunny by arbitrarily changing his name to something they wanted it to be.

I conceded that I didn’t know how intelligent a rabbit was, but I said, “Who chose the name Binky? Do you think that sixteen-year-old pet store employee had greater insight into Binky’s being, his personality, and how he wanted to be identified?”

“He is Binky the Bunny,” they said. “That’s who he was when we purchased him, it’s why we purchased him, and it’s who he is now.” The other family members liked that answer so much, because it suggested that they, as a family, respected and liked Binky so much that by keeping the rabbit’s name it paid homage to his heritage and ancestry so much that they wouldn’t alter that by enforcing their will on him. There was also an implied notion that the move from the pet store to their home was so confusing and traumatic that they didn’t want to add to that by forcing Binky to adapt to their personal preference of a name. They didn’t say this, but they implied that they didn’t change the rabbit’s name, because they wanted him to know that his past mattered to them too.

Twenty years ago, I may have continued to argue against what I considered holes in their argument with the tenacity of a terrier on an ankle, but the smiles of joy surrounding me that day suggested that not only was my war against Binky unwinnable, but if I did somehow achieve some definition of victory my only prize would be a diminishment of those smiles.

*******

“Why are you loyal to them?” a friend of mine asked. “They’re not loyal to you.” My friend said this when I told him that I just finished the year with no absences, no tardies, and the best quality scores I’ve ever accomplished as an employee. My uninformed guess is that this argument has probably been going on between employee and employer for as long as man has been employed by other men, but my Depression-era dad argued:

“No, that’s new to your generation, and probably a generation before yours, but we felt lucky to have a job.” Subjective critics of the modern era back my dad, “Companies and corporations actually cared about people back then [during The Depression and in the immediate aftermath]. Back then, employers kept people fed, happy, and alive. Businesses cared about people more back then. They paid more and gave better benefits back then. Now it’s all about the shareholders.”

‘So, you’re saying that The Depression-era companies and corporations didn’t have shareholders?’ I would ask those critics. ‘Or are you saying that they didn’t worry about them back then? Was that what led to The Depression? No, I know it didn’t, but did they worry about regaining the trust of the shareholders back in the aftermath of The Depression?’ My guess is the system was much more similar to the system we employ now than the subjective critics know.

“If you’re lucky enough to gain employment,” my dad taught us, “You stay with that employer for life.” That obviously didn’t penetrate, as my brother and I had numerous jobs before we landed great ones, but we met several fellow employees along the way who bought into my dad’s philosophy. Yet, we also found that their decades-long tenure at the company was not formed entirely by loyalty as much as it was fear. There were some who were loyal, some who were extremely loyal, but most of them stayed at the job that was no longer rewarding because they feared that they couldn’t do anything else, they were just happy to have a job, and they adjusted their life to how much money they made in that job.

The subjective, cultural critics examine the system from the position that most corporations are evil and selfish. They embody this argument with the comparisons of CEO salaries compared to the average worker’s salary. To which I ask who is more valuable, valued, and replaceable? They would avoid this argument by complaining that most CEOs are evil, selfish, and some even argue that CEOs aren’t truly the top figureheads in the corporate hierarchy. That’s right, most of the figureheads sitting atop the corporate hierarchy are inhuman monoliths that we call the corporation, and these inhuman monoliths don’t care about humans anymore. I’ll let others argue for or against that, and I’ll focus on the more rational argument that those in corporate hierarchy don’t care about us. How do you define care? The members of your corporate hierarchy care enough to fulfill their end of the bargain we agreed to when we decided to be employed by them. They continue to pay us for services rendered, and they give us all the benefits they promised when we were hired. They also give employees performance-based raises, bonuses, and stock purchase programs.

If we don’t care for the various agreements we made with them anymore, we need to get competitive and see how competitive the other evil, selfish, and inhuman corporate monoliths are willing to get for our services. Before agreeing to that change, we need to focus in on what these other corporations have to offer us for our skills before we agree to work with them. Change, as we’ve all discovered, is not always better.

As for companies not caring, I’ve worked with supervisors who didn’t give a crap about me, and I’ve worked with others who cared a great deal. Our relationship with an employer is often defined by our relationship with our immediate supervisor. If we go further up into the hierarchy, we find that those people do not, in fact, care about us, but it’s mostly because they haven’t met us, and they don’t know us. They are required to create comprehensive corporate policies that try to make us happy while making their bosses happy.

When I applied for a mid-management job in our huge corporation, my supervisor said, “If you’re hired, you’re going to get the stuff rolling at you from both sides. You have to make the employees under you happy, and you have to make the employees above you happy. You need to accept the fact that if you become a boss, you will still have a boss, because everyone has a boss.”

The thing the subjective critics don’t understand is that their supervisor has to make their manager happy, and that manager has to make their bosses happy, all while trying to make you happy at the same time. And they all have to make a CEO happy, who has to make the corporate board happy, and the corporate board has to make the shareholders happy. Everyone has a boss. To make the shareholders happy, the corporate board convinces the CEO to work with the hierarchy structure under them to make sure all of the machinations of the corporation are so finely tuned that they create the most evil word in the subjective critic’s dictionary: profit.

If you reach a point where you loathe that word as much as the subjective critics who believe there is no reward for company loyalty anymore, you might want to seek employment with a non-profit. Before we leave the for-profit for the non-profit, we should know that their will still be a hierarchal structure that mirrors the for-profit, corporate hierarchal structure, but we will be able to remove that evil shareholders brick (stressed with disdain). After deleting them, we will need to replace it with a brick designated for those who provide charitable contributions, and/or the funders who offer grants. Even though the names are changed, those in the hierarchal structure will still feel scrutinized to the point that they feel the need to perform for their bosses, and at some point in our tenure with the nonprofit we’ll feel disillusioned, because we’ll come to the conclusion that they don’t care about us either, they just focus on performance.

*******

There is one class of people who truly don’t care about us, criminals. Who are you? How do you define yourself? In ways significant and otherwise, we define ourselves by our stuff. We prefer to say the opposite at every outing, because we deem those who define themselves by stuff superficial and of diminished character. The moment after someone steals our stuff is the moment we realize that the stuff that defined us is now defining him, and we feel this strange sense of violation that informs us how valuable that stuff actually was to us.

When criminals steal something of ours, it offends us, because it feels like they’re taking elements of our character. Criminals don’t care about our attachments to stuff, and they don’t understand why we care so much about things. If they take one of our things, those things are theirs now.

When they spot something they want, they take it. It’s really not that different from the typical purchasing agreement we make with stores. We saw something on the shelves, and we took it. We paid the store for the product, yet money is an agreed upon, but artificial construct, if we view it from the criminal’s perspective. We took it from the store, and now they’re taking it from us. They don’t buy into that quaint and somewhat archaic idea of ownership the way we do.

Renee, my seven-year-old friend introduced me to this concept of the thief’s mentality when I spotted one of my Weeble Wobbles in her toy chest. “Hey, that was mine!” I said. “You stole it from me!”

She tried to convince me that her mother purchased it for her, until I pointed out a very specific flaw that her Weeble Wobble shared with mine.“Fine!” she said when she decided to give it back to me. She said that in a tone that suggested he didn’t understand what the big deal was. “I never saw you play with it, and I didn’t think you were using it anymore.”

“What? Even if I wasn’t, it was still mine, and if you wanted to borrow it, you should’ve just asked.”

“I said fine! Here,” she said, giving it back. We were seven-years-old, but in my limited-to-no experience in this field informs me that the misunderstanding of how the system works remains constant when I hear adult shoplifters try to compromise with store security by saying, “Here. Fine. I’ll give it back.” They hope by doing so, they can enter into an agreement with the storeowner that permits the storeowner to drop all charges. If that doesn’t work, they attempt to enter into an agreement with the storeowner, or manager, by saying they’ll pay for it. If the storeowner refuses, the criminal walks away thinking the store had a personal vendetta against them. It’s the thief’s mentality (trademarked).

At some point in this process, we’re taught to forgive and forget. “Everyone deserves a second chance.” If we refuse to forgive, our mothers, fathers, priests, and other authority figures teach us that holding onto anger, requiring retribution, and/or holding grudges have a way of darkening the soul. They say that learning how to forgive with all of our heart provides a spiritual cleansing that will pave the way for greater happiness. It’s true, and we know it’s all true. Yet, if we abide by the loving logic they teach us, and we decide to forgive the criminals for their violation, our relationship with the thief will arrive at another complicated definition of human interactions, when they steal from us again.

Fantastic, Now What’s a Jiffy?

January 12, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“Dr. Jones will be with you in a jiffy,” the receptionist says.

“Fantastic, now what’s a jiffy?” we ask. “I don’t need you to be exact, but I would like a rough estimate.”

Is it just me, or is it a little odd that those who work in doctors’ offices, auto mechanics, and other businesses that offer waiting rooms refrain from providing true Estimated Wait Times (EWT)? I understand that it’s tough, rough, and in come cases impossible to know with certitude, but all we’re asking for is a rough estimate from a receptionist, and her team of employees, with their decades of experience in their shared field, to come up with a fairly decent guess. When I enter their office I do so with my own EWT, my Expected Wait Time, and while I know my EWT might be uninformed compared to theirs, I’d enjoy gathering with them to see if we can find a Crucial Meeting Ground (CMG). The problem for those of us sitting in waiting rooms, waiting for our services to be rendered, is that most employees at places like doctors’ offices think they can circumvent all EWTs with: “A jiffy!”

“It will only take a jiffy.”

“Fantastic, now what’s a jiffy?” we ask again, “and before you answer, you should know that we’ve tried, for centuries we’ve tried, to come up with a definition that we can all agree on. Some stay vague, saying, ‘it’s lightning fast,’ ‘blink of an eye,’ or ‘in a flash,’ but physicist Gilbert N. Lewis clarified jiffy as the time it takes light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum, or 33.3564 picoseconds, and a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. So, if you’re equating your Estimated Wait Time to the physicist’s definition of jiffy, then you’re saying Dr. Jones should be ready in 0.0000000000333564 seconds, and that’s not too bad.”

The primary reason these businesses offer vague “jiffy?” EWTs, is the disgruntled customer. Anyone who has worked in the service industry knows that guy who approaches the desk with his “You said he’d be ready between 5:18 and 5:23. It’s now 5:24.” The disgruntled customer loves playing the sophisticate who can spot flaws, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies inherent “in the system”. “This is not a chicken McNugget,” this customer says displaying a small McNugget. “It’s a half of a McNugget. You’ve given me nine and one half of a McNugget. I ordered ten. It’s not even a half a McNugget. Look at it, it’s more of a third of a McNugget. Who do you think you’re dealing with here?” The reader reads this, and they think we’re using hyperbole to prove a point. Yet, if the reader worked in the service industry as long as we did, they know that some aggrieved customers believe that we pimply-faced sixteen-year-olds were in cahoots with our employer in a MickeyD-pimply face industrial complex conspiring against him, John McGillicuddy. If he’s not that far down the totem pole of conspiracy, he thinks the corporation has been putting it to the little guy for far too long, and he Mr. John McGillicuddy appoints himself the emissary for all those little guys who are afraid to stand up to pimply-faced sixteen-year-olds.

“It’s not about you, John McGillicuddy,” I want to tell these disgruntled customers. The pimply-faced sixteen-year-old in the back, didn’t see that John McGillicuddy was at the drive-thru, so he decided to throw a half nugget into the pack. “And one other thing, Mr. John McGillicuddy, or whatever your name is, all those snarky lines you dreamed up in the mirror the night before. We’ve heard them all before.” John McGillicuddy obviously brings a lot of baggage to the drive thru window, and he brings the same baggage to the waiting room receptionist who offers him a rough EWT. So, even though the jiffy line grates on me, I understand what drives an office to keep it general for the entry-level employees who have to put up with the John McGillicuddys of the world.

“Okay,” John McGillicuddy will say. “Let me talk to your manager.”

Here’s the dirty little secret that most in the service industry businesses won’t tell you. The manager is but another employee, at a higher level and often a little older and more experienced, but they are not granted a magic wand that can fix all of the flaws and inconsistencies you spot. The employees and managers can meet with their higher ups and eventually fix the flaws you’ve exposed, but it’s not going to happen today, while you’re all impatient and frustrated.

In other words, we know it’s not fair to take it out on the employees or even the manager, but they’re the face of the corporation standing before us. We also know to apply relative constructs to the term “jiffy” in conjunction with the nature of the services we require. In a doctor’s office, we could say that a jiffy should be anywhere between five to ten minutes, if our appointment was at 8:00 AM, and we showed up at the office at 8:00 AM. There are always going to be variables in a doctor’s office, of course, as some patients eat up more of the doctor’s time than expected, but doctors, and all of the employees in charge of the waiting room office, have a combined tenure of decades, and they should have a better feel for “a jiffy” in their Expected Wait Times. When I end up waiting twenty-three minutes for a doctor, I see that as a violation of the term a jiffy, as I know it and physicist Gilbert N. Lewis defines it. Twenty-three minutes waiting should be more of an auto mechanic’s definition of jiffy, but when I end up waiting over an hour and a half for them, I can’t help but think we’re all violating the jiffy. Even after allowing for relative definitions of the term in an auto mechanic’s shop, I can’t see how an hour and a half can even loosely be defined as a jiffy. Like those in a doctor’s office, auto mechanics’ employees have a combined decades of experience, and they should calculate their definition by how many cars are in front of me, and how long they think each job will take, until they 1-2-3 me and say, “I’m going to guess we’ll have you out of here in under two hours.” You know what I’d say to that? I’d say, “Thank you. Thank you for being so honest.” I’d say that because it’s much better to wait a concrete two-hour EWT than a vague jiffy that could take two hours.

*******

I only wrote a letter to a corporate home office one time, and to be completely honest, I hated doing it. I hated being that guy, that John McGillicuddy, so much that I didn’t write it that day, because I was overheated. I waited a day and composed a more professional, less emotional complaint letter. It was my only complaint letter, thus far, and I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, but if you’re a “jiffy” guy who violates with variables to the point that I question your veracity, it could vex me to the point that it triggers my emotional mutation into Letter Writing Man … and you wouldn’t like me when I’m vexy.

Cynically Yours

January 8, 2026January 13, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“Hi. My name is Rilaly, and I’m a cynic.”

I’m in recovery, which as any alcoholic will tell you is a stage in a process of trying to deprive ourselves of something we used to really enjoy. I never set out to enjoy ruining someone’s optimistic joy, but it felt so right to blast someone out of the water for saying something so nice about a person, place, or thing that I felt sophisticated and intelligent when I wiped that stupid and sanctimonious grin off their face. It wasn’t an emotional compulsion that drove me to do it, or medical, it was rhetorical.

**“Don’t you just hate happy people?”**

Very few people actually drop that line, but how many of us think it? Being right and wrong isn’t the primary driver of the cynic. We just want to put a chink in the silly narratives naive people have believed for so long.

Most cynics would tell you that’s a bunch of bilge. “It’s all about facts, and if you can’t see that, you’re naive. Science and Math. That’s what we rely on.” But what if we’re wrong? What if the optimists could provide incontrovertible evidence of our errors, what would we say? We’d smile a chagrined smile and walk away, saving our ammunition for another day, because if we learn how to sing the song, we can never be truly wrong.

“Cynicism is not necessarily equal to or greater than intelligence,” is the mantra we cynics use in our sessions. “It’s camouflage we use to conceal what we don’t know.”

I loved that phrase until fellow cynic, Julie Anne, obnoxiously argued that, “We need to remember that just because it’s negative doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.”

Did you have to reread that line? I know I did, rather I had to ask Julie Anne to repeat it as if I didn’t hear it the first time. It’s one of those down-the-stairs comments that doesn’t land until we’re walking away from it and into someone with that stupid grin on their face. When we run into that happy person who believes in things, they say things like, “I believe most people are good, until they prove me wrong.” Yow! Kabang! We hit them with our best shot, and we hit them with something negative that isn’t “necessarily true.” The argument about whether people are generally good or evil is difficult to prove, of course, but our certitude often relies on what appeals to us most, which basically proves Julie Anne’s line of thought.

We all start out naive. We believe our parents are good people and excellent stewards and beacons, until they prove us wrong. We believe our teachers have our best interests in mind, until our tweed and elbow patches professor opens his lecture with, “Everything they taught us in school was wrong!” Cynicism almost feels like evolution at a certain point, until even the most optimistic learn to frame their optimistic beliefs with proper qualifiers, like, “I’m not saying the world doesn’t suck, but …” It’s their way of trying to express themselves without everyone dogpiling them with synonyms of naive, and there’s nothing worse than being called naive.

Several individuals saved us from the dreadful indignity of that embarrassing label by introducing us to the comfy confines of cynicism. Once we gave the ‘everyone is awful’ idea a test drive, we discovered no one would call us a fool ever again. It’s foolproof. It might not necessarily be true, as Julie Anne would remind us, but being wrong is far better than being foolish.

We reserve the term fool for people who believe in people, places, and things. Once we became cynical, we joined in on the laughter, “How could they actually believe in that?” we asked our fellow cynics. We felt like we finally belonged. We found it much safer to believe most people are full of crud, and everyone from our parents to religious people to world leaders, and the most virtuous and honorable are probably a bunch of hypocrites who go home and beat their wives … when they aren’t our cheating on them (cue the laughter). “Imagine being them,” we say to conclude our laughter with the laughers, “believing that most people have the best intentions.” The comfy confines of cynicism aren’t limited to laughter and a sense of belonging, as it can provide a compelling sense of spiritual fulfillment when we learn how the world works, the real world.

The way the world works is so overwhelming and confusing when we’re young that it becomes our life’s mission to try to understand it. Our friends, and our unsafe, adult entertainment comedies taught us all of these delicious decoders that we couldn’t wait to use on those who don’t know. When we eventually crossed the sootstone arch (as opposed to the pearly gates of the optimistic believers) into the real world, we realized that if donned cynical camouflage it concealed what we don’t know, and we couldn’t wait for our peers to recognize how prepared we were. Our curtain raiser was directed at The Big Guys, because The Big Guys are honored, respected, and admirable, and their teardown is much more valuable to those in the know.

**“I heard the rumors, Danny,” Andrew Wood once wrote in a song called Mr. Danny Boy.**

After hearing that song, I did some research on Mr. Danny Boy, and I discovered it was about a man named Mr. Danny Thomas, who was considered one of the most honorable, admirable, and virtuous men who ever lived. I believed those rumors, because who wouldn’t? The naive didn’t. They thought he was honorable, admirable, and virtuous.

As with every characteristic, we strive to be the most. We want to be the funniest person in the room, the richest, the strongest, and the best-looking. We may not strive to be the most cynical in the same vein, but we strive for the most sophisticated in our knowledge. And what do cynics do when we encounter their competition? We don’t strive to be more cynical, we call our fellow cynic out.

When we relentlessly go after the Big Guys, for example, there will always be some guy who seeks to diminish our “Most cynical” crown with the joke, “You just hate that guy, just admit it. The guy could cure cancer, and you’d still have a problem with him.” That guy, in this particular scenario, is Amos Muzyad Yaqoob Kairouz, (aka Mr. Danny Thomas). All right, he didn’t cure cancer, but the incredible strides this man made during his life were largely unimaginable before he started in. He founded St. Jude’s Hospital, which has a documented history of making a significant dent in the number of children who suffer from, and die, from cancer.

When I hear that, my cynical side immediately rears its ugly head and says, “Ok, but Danny Thomas was an actor, and a celebrity. He dealt in a world of make-believe, so I’m guessing he didn’t actually found St. Jude’s Hospital. He didn’t found it in the way we normally associate an individual founding a hospital. He was probably a celebrity figurehead who attached his name to a process that was already in place but needed the type of funding a celebrity can attract by attaching his name to the founding. He probably took a photo with a massive pair of scissors, cut some tape, and raised a whole bunch of money for the hospital by doing so.”

Every celebrity seeks to show the public “another side” that displays the idea that they are well-rounded, sympathetic, empathetic, and heroically altruistic. In my humble opinion, that level of cynicism achieves a decent scorecard in most cases, but not here. Records state that Mr. Danny Thomas was actually a hands-on founder of St. Jude’s Hospital. Records state that St. Jude’s came into existence because Danny Thomas willed it into existence through decades of personal labor, fundraising, organizing, and strategic decision‑making. Records also indicate that Mr. Thomas involvement was not just some celebrity endorsement or involving a some sort of superficial or symbolic attachment. Records state that when it came to the founding of St. Jude’s Hospital, Danny Thomas was the man.

Defeating cynical sides, as they rear their ugly heads, is equivalent to that old childhood game Whack-A-Mole, as they help me appear smarter and more sophisticated in the way the real world works, in a way the average joe never will. One little head pops up and says, “Well then he probably found a way to turn this founding into some sort of money-making venture.” Another one pops up and says, “He probably benefitted from it financially in someway we’ll never know.” Again, we might be able to say that about most celebrity-backed ventures, as even the most charitable celebrities get paid administrative fees for handling the various activities of their altruistic venture, they get paid for speaking engagements on behalf of the charity, various appearance, they get their travel to and from paid, and/or some “other expenses” that aren’t illegal, but they’re dubious bullet points that the dubious-minded can recite when that debate arrives. Again, not here. There’s no credible evidence — none — that Danny Thomas ever profited or benefitted financially from St. Jude’s in anyway. Every historical record, nonprofit filing, and investigative report shows the same thing: he founded the hospital, built its fundraising arm, and spent decades raising money for it without ever taking a salary or receiving any financial benefits for those efforts.

Some records suggest St. Jude’s Hospital has helped save or ease the suffering of hundreds of thousands of children through direct treatment, and millions more through research that raised global survival rates. I’ve performed searches through search engines, and AI, asking for holes in this narrative. I’ve asked AI to approach the narrative regarding Danny Thomas founding St. Jude’s Hospital from a cynical perspective and provide for me information that a skeptic could latch onto when they’re seeking to know the real story behind Danny Thomas and St. Jude’s hospital, and AI can find no holes.

Yet, if you were alive during the early 90s after Mr. Danny Thomas died, and commentators were largely immune from character defamation lawsuits, you heard the rumors from standup comedians, shock jocks on the radio, and/or the cynical grapevine that grew from the fertilizer they created. You heard the rumors, and you laughed, because you knew there had to be more to the story. You also loved hearing the rumors, because they validated and vindicated what you thought all along. There had to be something.

Even if those rumors had any basis in fact—which they didn’t, according to every substantial news source, historical document, and/or any source that we might call substantive—the product of those rumors made substantial philanthropic and altruistic efforts and commitments to try to help children survive their fight against cancer.

“He wasn’t all that virtuous, let me tell you something,” those hanging from the cynical grapevine yelled with glee. “Let me tell you something ...”

“But Danny Thomas’s goal,” we should’ve said but didn’t, because we didn’t want to damage our cynical bona fides, “was to help kids suffering from cancer.”

“I know, but I just can’t stand it when someone thinks they’re all high and mighty.”

“Fair enough, but what does it say about you that you prefer to focus on the rumors as opposed to his considerable effort and commitments to help kids fight cancer?”

“I see the world in black and white,” is the preferred mantra of the cynic. “I can’t help it, I’m a facts-oriented person.”

I know that line, because I lived with it for so many decades that I will forever be in remission, but I’m trying. I’m trying to see some light in the darkness of the cozy comfort of cynicism. I’m also trying to learn that “Just because it’s negative doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true,” but it just feels so facts-oriented to believe the worst of humanity, until they prove me wrong.