Would you rather …?
VIEWPOINT
By RALPH HARDIN
Evening Times Editor W hen my friends and I were in grade school, we had a bit of a weird sense of what was funny, and gross-out humor was all the rage. Like when the Cabbage Patch Kids were super popular, boys like us got into the Garbage Pail Kids. And there was always some kid who was always willing to combine all the items on his lunch tray into some nasty concoction and eat it. And of course there were the jokes…
What’s worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm? Finding half a worm!
What’s worse than biting into an apple and finding half a worm? Biting into a hot dog and finding a vein!
Yep, third-grade humor at its finest. There was no World Wide Web back then. The only video games were these giant machines you had to put a quarter in to play, unless you knew someone who had an Atari 2600. Even things we take for granted nowadays like infinite options for watching TV were nothing like we have now, with a couple dozen channels if you had cable, and a little later on, going to the video store and renting movies to watch on the VCR.
So we entertained ourselves, playing football, riding bikes, reading comic books, and yes, playing these weird gross-out games. The grosser the better.
One of the absolute most bonkers way we passed the time while trying to crank up the yuck factor was playing a game called Would You Rather. If you somehow escaped this phenomenon, congratulations on running with a slightly more civilized crowd than the one I grew up with. But basically it goes like this: “Hey Steve, would you rather do this gross hypothetical thing or this other, possibly grosser hypothetical thing?”
There were no winners or losers. It was really only a game to see who come up with the worst possible two things to choose from. And it got pretty weird, like would you rather run your tongue along the edge of a razor blade or stick a toothpick between your toe and toenail and then kick the wall? I still cringe at some of those. There were also a lot of mean ones when we got a little older, like having to choose between kissing the ugly girl over at the other lunch table or drink milk out of your friend’s shoe.
We were 10. It was bizarre. I can’t defend it. The funny, or not-so-funny, thing is that as you get older, you kind of have to play real-life Would You Rather. No, it was no longer, “Would you rather lick your sister’s feet or run through the schoolyard naked?” It was more like, “Would you like to get a job or go to college?” or “Would you like to settle down and get married or run around with a bunch of different girls?” Again, there are no winners or losers. There are just decisions and consequences.
It never stops. I can very clearly remember back in the day, my wife and I would have to have conversations like, “Would you rather pay the telephone bill or buy groceries?” or “Would you rather put gas in the car or pay this past due doctor bill?” And people are still making those kinds of decisions nowadays.
This whole trip down memory lane came to me the other day when I heard that a lady from church had passed away after a long lingering illness. She was only a couple of years older than I am, and she left behind her husband, also around my age, as well as their two kids (again, pretty close to my own kids’ ages). I can’t even begin to imagine living the rest of my life without my wife. We lost a child, our first, 25 years ago at the age of 15 months. Would you rather lose a child or lose a spouse? It’s a terrible thought, and one that, at least, you don’t actually have to make. Life happens and you take it as it comes.
But it did get me to thinking about where our nation is right now. Last year at the polls, we had to play a very serious game of Would You Rather when it came time to cast our votes for president. And honestly, our options were very much like the gross-out game we played as kids. Neither option looked especially appealing.
Did we make the right choice? If the plan was simply to elect anyone that would rid us of the embarrassment of a second Trump term, then mission accomplished. If the plan was to turn a new corner and take America into new prosperity, then we seem to have stumbled somewhere along the way. In a year’s time, we’ll head back to the polls again for the mid-term elections, which means the Democrats have a year to convince us we made the right choice and the Republicans have a year to convince us that we made a mistake taking the power out of their hands. We’ll have to pick one or the other.
Would you rather. ..?
