For our editors to have time to pick through our columns for quality, errors, obscenity or utter incoherence, your friendly neighborhood Viewpoint writers generally have to have their material in a couple of days in advance. As a result, I am writing this piece on Wednesday, which just happens to be my 21st birthday. You can make out your congratulatory checks to Ian Booth, care of Technician.

As I sat at the bar at 11:57 Tuesday, impatiently tapping my finger for those last agonizing minutes, I had the time to ponder the significance of this “milestone.” By the time my first round was finally handed to me, I concluded that there was nothing to ponder. The state has arbitrarily rewarded my doing exactly what the odds suggested I would do in living to be more than a quarter of the average life expectancy for a white American male. When thought of that way, I can’t say the whole deal is all that impressive.

Of course, expanded drinking privileges aren’t really a reward, but thinking of them as such got me to thinking. As the evening progressed, the increasingly small part of my brain that remained lucid continued thinking in that vein. It turns out that a great many of the real awards handed out in society are thoroughly undeserved bits of recognition for accomplishing the mundane and the expected as well.

One thing I vaguely remember about elementary school was the constant, unceasing stream of awards and certificates handed out for every little thing. I remain convinced that a full half of the programs at the place were conceived primarily as a means of giving teachers another excuse to hand us a “Certificate of Completion.” Someone in the Department of Education is firmly in the pocket of the stationary lobby. Then there were the “reading drives,” where a demonstration of basic literacy was rewarded with all manner of gifts, ranging from candy to electronics to limousine rides.

Then there was high school, where every possible effort was made to bring as many people onto the stage within reach every year. Bring up all the kids who got scholarships. If there are not enough of those, bring out all the athletes. Never mind if some of them are six months away from an exciting career of flipping burgers and dodging child support payments. At my school, they had a special award for kids who had gone through “a tough year.” Illness, family problems, getting knocked up by the burger-flipping athlete — it didn’t matter whether they had overcome their problem by excelling in something or not, just that they had a problem.

Rewarding mediocrity is not only an affront to people who have actually accomplished things, but it is a dangerous policy in a competitive world. At least we have something on which we can squarely place the blame: the concept of self-esteem. From the moment it gained prominence in the public conscience, American society has been in trouble. Fifty years down the road, the kids who got a pat on the back for making C’s are going to be serving the kids who got a whipping for the same. Look at the fastest-growing economies in the world and one should notice that none of them are known for leniency toward so-so performance.

Kids in fifth grade are supposed to know how to read. Kids in high school are supposed to get into college and not the maternity ward. And I’m supposed to still be alive at the age of 21, just like the overwhelming majority of the species. None of these things are accomplishments, and none of them deserve to be rewarded.

So next time someone screws up, forget their self-esteem. You don’t have to break their will to live or anything, but make sure they understand that they have failed and that such is not acceptable. If you are the one to screw up and you get called out, you finally got exactly what you deserved for it.

One last thing: If you read those sentences and it strikes you as overly harsh, well, that just means that the feel-good Nazi’s have already gotten to you.