Sunday, May 21, 2006

Silver has taken pretty bad knockings lately. I mean, look at it. It looks good ; In fact, it's quite flashy. It's rare enough to be considered relatively valuable, and it's unreactive and malleable enough to be a good choice for jewelry. Everything would be perfect in the Silver Age or a Silver World.... That is, if it wasn't for gold. Because of gold, silver has been associated with second place, or the "first loser" position, much like the Worker's Party is acknowledged as "most powerful association to not overthrow the PAP". It's always been the gold medal, followed by the silver medal, without any other deviation. A silver anniversary is twenty-five years. However, that only makes it half as good as a gold anniversary.

With the advent of "white gold" and platinum, widely judged to be more valuable, silver has been relegated to being a title for 2nd place, the last name of the guy who makes all the action movies and half the name of a popular surf brand, among other irrelevant terms. Even the phrase "every cloud has a silver lining" makes you wonder just how useful that silver lining is going to be, after all, you'd rather it be platinum.

Which brings us back to the argument we can make that's actually relevant today : What's so bad about being 2nd place? Overobsessed parents, psychotic education staff and paranoid students are all getting in on the action, seeing as how there's a need to have a portfolio thicker than a Dan Brown novel to do anything with your life, but even then, the definition of "doing something with your life" is highly debatable. Quite frankly, doing things for the sake of showing how good you are is utterly pointless ; After all, those who are actually good wouldn't feel the need to do all this. That's what makes them so hard to distinguish from slackers. So you manage to bluff people into thinking you're smarter and more capable than you actually are. Big deal. In the end, it's the results that counts, so if you have to rely on other things to get you anywhere, that says a lot about, well, everything about you.

It is, however, only human nature to be competitive. But when the argument for being pissed at a average grade is that "it's not good" and the argument for grumbling at a good grade is that "it's not great" and the argument for crying over 2nd place is that "it's not first", it makes me wonder if there's something inherently wrong with human nature itself.

1 Comments:

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