Bamboozled- How to avoid getting the shaft

LOOK WHO WE HAVE COMING TO CHAOS KIDS CLUB!!!


Hey, kids, are you always feeling like life is unfair and you're forced to eat a whole plate of vegetables while everyone else is pigging out on ice cream, corn chips and the Fill Me Up Extra Fattie at Burger Fats? Do you get picked last for every team in gym class except the clean up the sock tub at the end of the week team? Are you always told by your dumb teacher that you "have to play fair with the other boys and girls" when the other boys and girls are just entitled little cretons who cheat, lie and manipulate their way into every possible advantage while you keep your little nose to the grindstone to please the man? If you answered yes to both questions, you may be getting the shaft. Getting the shaft means getting stuck with all the bad jobs like cleaning the chalkboard, staying in at recess to help the big, slow kid do math with an abacus, killing all the wasps in the room with an outdated red dictionary, and going to meetings with your mouth-breathing boss who is a walking billboard for never hiring your relatives for any important positions at the company. That's right, I'm talking about you, Mr. Smith. I mean your daughter wouldn't register on an IQ test, that's how far down the evolutionary ladder she fell. 10 years at American Chaos and I'm writing a kids column! Why don't you just make me find the banana and the toothbrush in the Highlights magazine drawing? At least I'd have my dignity. Sorry, kids as you can tell, Bamboozled has alot of baggage when it comes to working for the system or getting the shaft.

Here are some things you can do to avoid getting the shaft:

1) No dipping your ink in the company well. That means no inner office dating, and that includes chasing Suzie on the playground or smashing her apple juice cup for no apparent reason. Don't do it unless you want to live in a smelly hole known as regret.

2) Whenever possible pass the blame onto someone beneath you in the pecking order. That means if you get caught holding the bag with the evidence, you find the weakest link and dump it on that weakest link. This only works if you are not the weakest link, if you are the weakest link, you are SOL or simply out of luck. Listen, I don't like it any more than you do, but it's how things are done in these United States as long as bankers are getting bailed out and your mom and dad are getting mailed out an unemployment check.

3) Rise up against the powerbrokers and take them down by any means necessary, as my good friend Malcolm X told me back when they let Memphis, Detroit, and Watts burn all night long because they didn't have any whities squatting there. Powerbrokers are your parents, the teachers, the PTA, the boy scout leaders, every living soul who keeps you from being all that you can be, reaching for all the gusto in life, and walking down the street with a little more hop in your hip hop. You got to tell the powerbrokers you ain't gonna clean their room no more, you are not some slave to the dollar or the grade or the star chart in the front of the classroom. Star chart! Rip that sucker down next time you are in that class and tell the lady you done with that line of bull. Star chart! You don't need no white lady on a power trip telling you who's a good boy and who ain't. You're a man, not a boy! Never forget that.

4) Sock it to the man. The babysitter, the cafeteria lady who says you don't get that last ice cream or day old cookie, the man who keep telling you to wait because your day is gonna come. Don't you trade your mom's homemade apple peach sugar twist for another meat loaf sandwich, when the meat loaf is just pre-processed, already made, plastic tasting, never liked you in the first place, insult your mama and all your family, hand me down, no good, nasty looking olive loaf with shoe polish or food coloring added to slide it past you and get inside your body to stomp all over your digestive system and rot your brain and will power til' you ain't nothing but a shadow of your former self and hope is an echo in a canyon that you can't quite place the voice of or who would even say something like that in the first place. Sock it to the man, everyday in everyway, little man and little lady. Sock it to the man. You may not win, but at least you in the battle.

Little children, that is how you avoid getting the shaft. Next time, Bamboozled gonna talk about knowing when to leave well enough alone. That's the story in all its glory, end of chapter, end of book.