Warning, my first PG-13 Blog

For some reason while shaving yesterday, I started thinking about something I had heard in the hallway the other day. Some girl was singing some line of Born this Way by Lady Gaga and she looked at her friend and said something to the effect that "She is so right, I am going to screw being nice and just be what I am." Now Born this Way is a catchy song, and one could argue a lot about the sort of moral paradox it could rationalize if one wanted to, but I doubt Lady Gaga really wanted kids to use this song as an excuse to be arses to one another. I watched her interview on 60 Minutes and she was surprisingly (or maybe more so refreshingly) calculated, crafted, and together.

But none of that is really my point. I think in America we love to celebrate the "bad ass". We love to romanticize the idea of raging into town, kicking butts, and taking names and not caring what people think about us. We see it in the movies, tv, the radio. A worker walks out of their job because of their awful boss, a girl dumps her boyfriend for a hotter model, etc. And honestly, the "B.A." appeals to all of us. I am sure most of us have probably embellished a story or anecdote to make ourselves seem more frightening and hardcore than what our real, less secure self will allow us to be. We hike up our pants, place our booted foot on a chair, snort and spit. But is the "B.A" persona really an idea that we want to strive for?

There are some good qualities to that way of life. I mean every coin has a flip side. It is good to not care what people think about you IF you are doing positive things. If you are being nice to a person whom no one else is, then yeah that is good. If you aren't talking about how ugly some woman is while all your friends do and judge you for not, then once again, kudos to you, because that takes some guts. However, we don't count that as being "B.A." The little judges with their comments would probably tell you that it lacked personality, lacked that "it"factor, if you were on B.A. Idol. They would be looking for you ramming the car of the person who cut you off, or for you to poor coffee on the rude McDonald's worker before going to work. I think our definition of B.A. has been misconstrued. Counterculture, raging against the machine, used to be the way of the B.A., but now more so it seems to be about self-promotion, self-glorification, about gaining stories where we lie and make other people seem small in order for our own tall tale to push onward into eternity.

If I apply this litmus test to myself then yes my Mohawk was "bad ass," but being overly mean or harsh to a kid so the rest of my kids laugh at him or her or so my coworkers don't view me as a pushover, is just being an arse. And just being an arse really doesn't prove anything other than that I am shallow and worried too much about an image that no one really cares about. So I would hope that none of us fall victim to the pressure of being a false "B.A." I know I need to check my own motivations, and to be ok with being the more mild mannered Crady Bear that I am.