A different platform

I hear ideas.

I'm not talking about the occasional flashes of marketing brilliance that will catapult my client Harry's House of Catheters into the stratosphere, I'm talking about real world ideas.

Maybe you've heard them too?

Free healthcare for all!

Oh great, after I've spent the better part of my 44 year old lifetime shelling out thousands and thousands of dollars for insurance I never used, now some clown wants to make it free?

I probably shouldn't be saying this as it I might be tempting the gods, but I've never spent an entire night in a hospital. Ok, there was that one time my wife was giving birth. But typical of my luck, she got the bed (and the epidural) and I had to sleep on a slippery reclining faux leather chair that didn't fully recline.

What about free college for all!

That seems to be the soup de jour. Of course it raises its seductive head only weeks after I make the final tuition payment on my youngest daughter's expensive out of state college edumecation.

I swear the day after they lower me into the ground or spread my abundant ashes in the Upper Grey's Meadow campground, doctors will announce a new prostate cancer test that will eliminate the need for a 'momentary exploration of my Lincoln Tunnel.'

It wouldn't be right of me to be spending so much time complaining about the state of the world without offering up some ideas of my own. They may not be the most unique ideas, I'm looking at you biodegradable straws, but what they lack in originality they make up for in pragmatism.

SERVICE -- I don't want to wade into Israeli politics, but you have to admit when it comes to national spirit these guys know what they're doing. Every Israeli kid, the minute they turn 18, has to serve in the military. We should steal a page from their playbook.

I'm not suggesting we re-instate the draft. I'm saying every 18 year old kid has to give back to the country that has given them so much. They can be in the Forestry Service, the Coast Guard, or even the local sanitation department. Not only will this free labor go a long way to easing some of our national problems it will smack that entitled smirk off so many millennial/Gen Z faces.

TRAVEL -- Another thing the Israelis do right is engender the notion of pride. With the Birthright program my daughters both hopped on a plane and spent a collective month in Israel and its neighboring countries. They will both tell you it was an eye opening experience.

American kids, particularly the ones sporting the red golf caps, are insolent in their self imposed isolation. They don't know how the world works, nor it seems are they interested.

"Murica, Fuck Yeah" 

We could put a dent in this willful ignorance. What if countries like Ireland, Germany, Italy, Ethiopia, China, India, Norway, etc., all offered their own version of a Birthright program.

Moreover, what if they partnered with Ancestry.com and showed every 18 year old kid reaching for a tiki torch or a white hood, that before there was America First, there was first your grandparents and great grandparents washing their clothes on rocks and struggling to make ends meet in countries you can't even spell.

And finally...

DOGS -- I love dogs. I love my dog. Your dog, maybe not so much. Particularly if it insists on barking all the goddamn time.

If there's one thing this world needs -- and I know because I have tried every device known to man -- it's an effective repellent that can be operated with a single push of a button or even an app on my iPhone that will make a loudmouth, barking dog who doesn't understand that people are sleeping off 1/2 bottle of Knob Creek bourbon at 6 in the morning, to shut the fuck UP!!!