That reminds me of this slightly crazy guy I knew in college and roomed with senior year. He had been an RA, and "somehow," during some meeting, he managed to discharge part of a pepper spray canister, which led to the meeting having to be evacuated. I think it must have been accidental, precipitated -- obviously -- by playing with it at an utterly inappropriate time.
I don't take any life lesson from the article, which was vaguely glib and self-satisfied. Life is never fair; sometimes you have the knife and don't know how to use it; sometimes you work hard and lose the fight for not having a knife. What you want is to have both the knife, the right preparation, and the right opportunity to use it all at the same time. How do you go about setting all that up?
Yes, no question. In fact, some amount of the sentiment you espoused is considered such airtight good advice that it has been built right into law. Universal education, for instance. No one seriously thinks everything taught in grade school is so essential that if you forget even one fact, guaranteed disaster follows. Clearly, the guiding principle is to teach a little of everything, under the theory that it's inherently good to be prepared, and even if you only retain 50% -- so what.
I think it might be literally impossible to totally reject what you said, in the sense that you could probably die if you were 100% against preparedness. So, yeah.
I don't take any life lesson from the article, which was vaguely glib and self-satisfied. Life is never fair; sometimes you have the knife and don't know how to use it; sometimes you work hard and lose the fight for not having a knife. What you want is to have both the knife, the right preparation, and the right opportunity to use it all at the same time. How do you go about setting all that up?