Phanatic to Reward Local Students for Doing Normal Things

Refuses Invitation to My House, Again

Mount Pleasant Elementary School in Wilmington, Delaware was the site of an utter travesty this past week when sports’ greatest mascot showed up to reward the students for reading a lot.  Reading, of course, is a big part of school as a child.  Not only is it expected of you, but if you’re not doing it even a little bit, they don’t really let you advance to the following grade.  So it was sort of like rewarding a contractor for using his tools.

“Hey, thanks, man! I really appreciate you not trying to use a microwave to put my tool shed together.”

It’s a program called “Be a Phanatic About Reading,” in which the school system gave up on children and was forced to offer them incentives in order to get their attention.  While getting kids to read is great, this inevitably teaches them the wrong lesson:  That the completion of each basic task in their lives will be followed by the manic dancing and hilarious antics of one of the greatest heroes in American history, the Phillie Phanatic.

Which is all fine I guess, if you’re a child who happens to go to that school.  But think of all those schools across the Delaware Valley, breeding adolescent Phillies fans who won’t know the violent caress of a man pretending to be a mysterious beast from the Galapagos!  All of those wildest fantasies going unfulfilled!  All of those endless math lessons continuing uninterrupted by the Phanatic flailing his arms in the air!

And now consider the same thing, but with fully grown adults who also want that same thing!  What about them?!

THE WORLD IS A CRUEL AND UNFAIR PLACE SOMETIMES.

Some local students recently go to find out just how cruel and unfair it is; only they got to discover this from the happier side; as in, “Goodness, can you imagine a world where the Phanaticdidn’t burst into our classroom and dance around a bit?  What an awful, barren existence that would be.”

Now we’ve got a generation of people who will be looking over their shoulders in anticipation of a one-mascot party materializing because they successfully change a baby’s diaper or didn’t blast through a red light.

No, it’s better that these kids take a more important lesson from this experience from me:  If things don’t work out the way you’d like, complain on the internet.  That’s just how things get done these days.