Remember – once upon a time – when cars had bumpers? And when you were idling in the Target parking lot, some distant bimbo, distracted by the smudge of eyeliner and the ever-twirling of her dyed-blonde hair, slowly, stupidly, crashes into your rear end at 7 mph?  And you step out, annoyed, surveying the scratches, and like a thug in every cartoon-sunglasses-dropping meme, just shrug it off and hop back into the driver’s seat, because that’s what bumpers were for.

Nowadays, you so much as cough on the back end of a Passat and the whole damn thing falls apart.  That’s an embellishment, of course, but you’re still forking over $2,000 to the body shop for what was once an automobile hiccup.  When you stop and think about this, you realize it’s a frightening parallel to our own existence, of how pathetic we have become as humans, and how the petty collisions of life that we used to just take in stride now totally wreck us. We need safe spaces and safe havens and complete insulation from anything unfamiliar.

In short, we have become weak men.

Perhaps the answer isn’t to further cushion the inevitable collisions of life, but rather to prepare us for when the damage comes.  Maybe we need a little retraining; you know, what they once upon a time called a crash course.

Danny Hankner

Editor-in-chief