It was the best day of the year
You know, first came the catalogues,
and then you scammed your parents into thinking you cared about reading.
And at the end of the week
all you had was a backpack full of stale erasers.
It was the Scholastic Book Fair.
You remember the colorful cardboard shelves lined with Chicken Soup for the Soul
and Captain Underpants
lavishly decorated with sparkly plastic trash you would sell your Neopets and your soul to buy.
And this established a strict social hierarchy in your second grade class
with the alpha being the girl who could afford the thirty dollar Japanese gel pens
while the plebeians of the classroom could only afford those God-forsaken yellow pencil grips.
For only seventy-five cents
you can develop arthritis at the age of nine.
Grow up and use a fucking pencil.
Your parents are getting a divorce.
That hit a sore spot for some of you. I'm sorry.
Book fair trinkets weren't the only class divider.
If you wanted to be top dog,
you had to support a cause.
And you know what I'm referring to.
They're yellow,
you couldn't help but put one in your mouth
just that one time
just to see what it was like,
and if you didn't have one
you were basically pro cancer.
What was I actually contributing to
when I bought a thirty pack of LiveStrong bracelets
when I was ten?
Well,
it really did go to a good cause.
The money I spent on my parent's credit card
helped raise money for the LiveStrong Foundation,
which offers support for people effected by cancer.
It was originally called the Lance Armstrong Foundation...
up until he lost one of his...
you know...
sponsorships from the blood doping scandal.
And around the same time,
my elementary school was demanding
that I bring in Ziploc baggies full of cardboard scraps.
Who exactly was I helping
by bringing in like four Box Tops a year?
Well,
schools can cash them in
and earn up to $20,000 per year
which they can use for anything tied to education.
Computers,
books,
playground equipment,
Ritalin,
cigarettes...
But they're only worth like ten cents each...
Ten cents?
Ten cents is like a depression era amount of money.
No wonder they were rationing the Welch's Fruit Snacks.
Growing up,
you only wanted to eat those fruit snacks
because you thought
literally everything else was potentially carrying mad cow.
Do you guys remember mad cow disease?
That was our rationale for becoming vegetarian
for like a day in third grade?
And we all remember abstaining from burgers
because our mothers, teachers, and
Sally Henderson from recess told us that
we would die from mad cow disease.
So,
what happened?
Well, mad cow is linked to a human version called
variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome
and between 1996 and 2014,
only four people in the US have died from that.
A couple of countries here and there
occasionally report a mad cow case, but
as long as your not eating the brains or spinal fluid
of anyone infected, you're probably okay.
Meanwhile,
the flu is the number eight cause of death
in the United States
so stop self medicating with kombucha
and Airborne and get fucking vaccinated.
"No it's really bad for you!"
It's fucking solved everything.
"The kombucha is really good."
After we stopped pretending to care
about our health,
we moved on to pretending we cared about social justice.
Remember when you couldn't scroll through
your Facebook without seeing this picture?
Why was that other guy masturbating
on the street in San Diego?
You were hashtagging "Stop Kony" and "Kony 2012"
every single day.
So now we're wondering,
did we actually stop Joseph Kony?
Basically, no.
But, Kony 2012 was one of the biggest internet campaigns
in history and became an example
for the white savior industrial complex
we all know so well.
Because if we know anything
about white high school students,
they only care about two things.
Facebook likes
and horses.
That has nothing to do with Kony 2012
but we felt we needed to address it.
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