The Silver Spoon

     Despite my early indoctrination into one of the finest schools of sarcasm (under the expert tutelage of my dad, sister, and aunt), I have always had the awful tendency to take things too literally. Nowadays, I practically see sarcasm and hyperbole coalesce from mouths in a string of italics ("No, really, we love your blog…"), but there was a time when I would take snide remarks and idioms as the gospel truth and create a remarkably vivid mental picture- at least for a kid whose honor roll status was constantly under the sole threat of Mrs. K, the hippie art teacher.

     For instance, I almost started this piece with the phrase, "when I was knee-high to a grasshopper…" but that phrase always makes me think of myself as a fetus or as that TV-loving kid on meth from Willy Wonka (post microwave debacle). And, hand to God, for the first 12 years of my life, I thought the ending to the phrase "People in glass houses..." was "… shouldn't walk around naked." Because if I lived in a glass house, that would be my first thought. And let's be real; that makes more sense anyway.

     I had one of these long-term misunderstandings with the phrase "born with a silver spoon in your mouth." To be honest with you, I have only in the last year or so come to realize what is meant by the phrase that my blog's banner has drawn inspiration from (yeah, that random picture it has a purpose). Yet again, I took the phrase too literally and formed an all too realistic mental image. What bothered me the most was how a kid ends up with a spoon while in utero to begin with, and how the birth happens with the utensil protruding from the kid's mouth. You can fill in the rest of the mental images, but as someone who has already had such images let me recommend against it. Vehemently.

     I knew the phrase meant to be born more fortunate than others with exceptional affluence and opportunities because of your family, but I never understood how having a spoon in your mouth when you were born could be a reflection of this. To me, it just seemed like a choking hazard.

     I always failed to make the connection that "born" wasn't literally "at the moment of birth," but rather alludes to "being reared from a young age." The kid wasn't a gestational marvel, but was simply being fed his Gerber's (or whatever the rich-person equivalent of Gerber's is... Gerbèr's?) with a silver spoon.  I know for most of you this is all "well, duh" territory, but you have to understand that when I hear a phrase I immediately create a mental image, and that mental image becomes as real to me as what I see with my eyes, so this reality that I create is not easily upended, no matter how absurd I know it to be.

    But this saying is still absurd, isn't it? I mean, I only know a couple of people with any pure-silver utensils, and they sure as hell aren't breaking them out for use on the pre-masticated mush of baby food. The kid doesn't care that it's eating from something of monetary and ornamental significance; the kid is just thinking "I wonder if I can vomit and poop at the same time!"

     I suppose that's the point though, to highlight the perceived absurdity of the wealthy. The phrase is clearly gilded with malice towards the well-to-do because the middle and lower classes often hold the wealthy in contempt- especially the children of the wealthy who will grow up to be affluent for no reason other than who their mommy and daddy are. This is especially true right now, as the world is still teetering on the edge of this economic crisis and the U.S. enters election season. People are frustrated with CEOs' "golden parachutes," another phrase of absurd decadence that makes no sense to me (if you have a sheet of gold strapped  to you, you're going to hit the ground even harder than barebacked I'd imagine). People are sick of politicians who are "disconnected" from their constituents because of their wealth- Romney's two biggest fires to put out right now involve his infamous vacation where he strapped his dog to his roof (people are making this out to be proof-positive that Romney is disconnected from us due to wealth) and his shockingly meager tax bracket due to the legislative loophole that he's an investor, not a worker.

     The wealthy have plenty to say back, usually with the themes of jealousy, stupidity, socialism, free-loading, Reaganomics, and hippies peppered in remarks to their detractors. So now we find ourselves in a fierce class warfare, marked by OWS and the "99%," and so much derision that you would think we were living in feudal Europe, not one of the most prosperous and socially mobile societies in global history.

     Maybe this metaphor isn't about the rich kid 's exorbitant lifestyle. Maybe this metaphor is about us, our society as a whole. The generations before us built up a great and prosperous society, founded on noble and auspicious principles, and defended this society through two noble world wars, and because of all of their achievements and sacrifices we now have a sense of entitlement. Entitlement to a high-paying job, entitlement to a suburban 4-bedroom house with 1.86 kids and an SUV, entitlement to whatever new gadget is out this quarter. We think we are entitled to all of these things because for so long they have simply been given to us. So now that they are being taken away, we are having a temper-tantrum because our spoon is no longer silver.

     Our entitlement was fed even more by our addiction to credit. My grandpa never had anything he didn't earn first (including his freedom). His generation never had a home equity crisis, or a credit crisis, because they took what they earned and nothing more. By contrast, when we weren't given what we were "entitled" to, we took it on credit- plastic for silver. That's called alchemy, and it isn't real.

     Our world isn't in a financial crisis because of lazy workers or greedy heads of corporations; in one form or another those things have been around for centuries in far worse proportions. Our world is in a crisis because we are spoiled children that never grew up. We're in this because we're all vain, selfish, and whiny, and we had better turn our backs from the decadence of silver and the temptation of plastic if we are ever going to be prosperous or happy ever again.