Forget the New World Order, welcome to your New American Civility. Rebellion by college youth has given way to consumption conformity. Rebellion by intellectual elites who foment revolution to throw off usurpers of civil liberties was abandoned by wealth-induced comfort. Rebellion against our parents was replaced by iPhones, a new Xbox, rides to school and soccer practice by parents pushed to paranoia that their children may not have the confidence to be sufficiently arrogantly snobbish – one of the requirements for self-righteous future business leaders. Rebellion has devolved to the level of knuckle scraping Neanderthals, sitting comfortably in corporate restaurants with families of working people, displaying their disdain for all that is normal.

What kind of evolutionary non-sense has unfolded upon our species or are the creationists right? I thought as teens we threw off the shackles of our parent’s outdated modes of archaic survival only to join the masses with a new set of self-imposed shackles shortly afterward. In the years we are supposed to be building our base of knowledge for a path towards wisdom we are replacing it with knuckle tattoos, name-calling, adult obsessions with television shows where pain is self-inflicted, dancing celebrities, or other contrivances hyped by fellow human beings. Today at lunch, sitting at the table next to ours was this guy,  whose back of his bald head was giving me the finger. I suppose this was cool in jail and let the rivals to his criminal tribe know he is a badass who without fear can flip the bird to anyone’s child, grandmother, or international visitor in any public space,  that he could partake his fill of liberty and then add a t-shirt to his cranial billboard announcing that he is not happy enough to visually curse you but would like to announce that the death of others is somehow an admirable quality that makes this guy just cool for being so bald, tall, bikerish, menacing, and in your face. Take that you people eating lunch at Cracker Barrel as I spit vulgarity in your general direction!

For months Starbucks employees from various locations would try to entice me into buying a loyalty card. Every day I would hear how I could save the charge for soy milk and the syrup add-in. Every day I would say no thanks. And then one day I finally gave in. Heck, on my morning latte I would save seventy cents alone. Often Caroline and I would get a latte late in the day, I could save another $1.10. I took my newly charged loyalty card home and registered it on the internet so I could begin my savings.

Immediately I see we are going to save $54 dollars a month and I am quite happy. The thing is though, this has backfired for the Starbucks corporation. All too soon I have to recharge the card, so I put another $30 on it. Within three days my balance is once again depleted, ok I’ll put $40 on it this time. Every three or four days I find myself having to put money on this card. While I was buying a coffee every day on my debit card I never bothered to account for what I was spending, it was just a little here and then a little more later in the day. Now I’m faced with feeling like I’m charging the card three or four times a week and if I put $30 or $40 each time, I do a little calculation, we must be spending between way too much and an ungodly amount per month on coffee.

Solution: just as I took the card to save $54 a month on our coffee habit, I must use the card to wake up to the financial waste and stop the morning coffee, which will save me another $105 a month. That works for a while but now I’m considering that we move to only go to Starbucks every other day which would save another $97 a month. Attention Starbucks corporate marketing geniuses you have cost your company $159 dollars a month in lost revenue and are about to lose another $97 a month for a grand total loss of $3,072.00 per year because you pushed your baristas to interest me in a loyalty card. Thank you for your consideration in bringing my reckless spending to my attention.