It’s  true. We trust idiots. We always have.

Sometimes it’s because we have no choice: they’re in a position superior to ours, they have power, and we don’t. A college dean can be brilliant and exude in students a faith in their professors and their choice of university, and still be a great big dickhead. He lies. He’s selling a product. A blowhard salesman whose job it is to keep you in university. And they hurt the very people they’re supposed to help.

About midway through their first semester, a sinking feeling creeps up on the student. Something doesn’t seem right. Ah, but nothing can be done. It’s too late. For the rest of the semester or the year, they try to put it out of their mind.

By Christmas break of their second year, the student has heard the talk. If that individual had a funny feeling in their freshman year, then as a sophomore, no longer kept at arm’s distance from upperclassmen because of traditional snobbery, the student learns that they’re all trapped. It’s all an elaborate scam. Sure, if you work hard and take uppers and drink all the black coffee you can hold, you can eventually earn a degree. Or, if you have stock in Starbucks, maybe you can even pull down a doctorate.

Now, in the hole, and by ludicrous amounts of money, you have the parchment. Except, of course, that’s not real parchment. It’s vellum, if it is anything fancy. It’s just paper most of the time. And nobody painstakingly scribbled that calligraphy by hand. It didn’t even come off a Heidelberg press. It came from a desktop printer. Perhaps you even have one like it in your dorm.

Then you put together a résumé and hit the concrete. And find out that no matter how you wrote it, or what template you may have used, or how you spelled “resumé” it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all, and if you get an offer for work, your starting salary is a paltry 14-20k per year. You stagger. You could fall down. The blow hits you that hard. Four to six years of your life or more are behind you, and yet all you get is barely even a white collar job, probably less. That fucking degree you coveted and then heard talk about? Well, the talk was true, and the bloody thing isn’t even worth what the printer, probably an ancient HP, used. It’s too rough to use as asswipe. Maybe it is suitable for origami. Your life is, in your shocked brain, a lie.

At this point, several things begin happening: you’ve just spent a lot of time and a shitload of money only to wind up living back home with mom and dad. At this point, people sometimes think about ending their own lives. A high school and college romance is shattered forever. You see no future. If you think about it, you picture yourself saying into a microphone, “Do you want fries with that, sir?” Or maybe you see yourself waitessing in some cheap-ass club where you have to go topless. It gets grim. On a sunny day, you see only gray clouds.

This is what I call the “Coyote Trap,” which is a distinct racketeering sham above almost every other type.

Farmers, ranchers, and the few true trappers left who use methods from centuries ago will, if you press them, admit that trapping rabbits, raccoons, opossums, mink, weasels, gophers, rats, and many other species are no challenge at all compared to trapping a coyote. Those bastards are the real thing, and they’re even hard to shoot. Even a fox is no match to a coyote for avoiding traps.

But you, Joe, and you, Jane College, you have been caught in the perfect coyote trap. They told you that to succeed in life, you needed a degree. Well, you did that. You did everything that was asked of you.

And now here you are, back in the meanest part of your city, or on Maple Street, and there is, at this point, no distinction between the two. You’re fucked. They got you.

Consult. They tell you, go back, get a secondary degree. What?

What the hell does that mean?

The most devastating scam going, the college education ruins arguably more lives than they enrich.

If you or anyone you know is contemplating suicide, call the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 988 in the United States. Spanish and English speaking operators are always there to help. Please give them and yourself a chance. You deserve to live, and we are stronger with you than without you.

What I described above is a real problem. It’s happening right now, all over the country. Scamming someone is one thing. Crushing their spirit is a crime against God, nature, and humanity.

But let’s keep going. Because since the 1970s, an idea, put into practice in the following decade, was a Coyote Trap on a whole different scale. And we’re all victims. We’ve all been caught in the snare. And it is more serious than you may think.

Because Plastic recycling is a bigger lie than even I believed just six months ago, and what I learned then was disgusting.

If you currently recycle plastic, you should know that whether it’s in the UK or the US, it makes no difference. You’ve been had.

That’s because from the very beginning, manufacturers knew that plastic recycling was impossible. The types of plastics passed on to consumers are all different. A tub of Maxwell House coffee is made from a higher density material than a soda bottle. The two cannot be recycled together. A clamshell clear plastic tray with overpriced barbecue chicken wings or a salad, well, that can’t be recycled at all. It’s single use plastic. That’s the kind you have to throw away after one use. Plastic wrap never could be recycled either. We thought, “Well, it’s plastic, so throw it into the collection bin.” We were wrong. Very few types of plastic can be recycled. Manufacturers never claimed that they could be, so who are the bad guys?

The petroleum giants. They push the gas and oil to make these plastics. And, of course, food manufacturers love plastic. There isn’t much packed in glass and paper anymore. When I can, I pay extra for a product in glass or paper, eschewing plastic milk bottles for paper, to name one example.

Even those plastic containers that can be recycled can only be so treated once. That’s because after that, there’s nothing to recycle. If you buy something in a package that says “100% reecycled,” you have to throw it in the trash. Not only that, but recycling produces greenhouse gas. It is the ultimate lie.

And since recycling centers have to have employees to pick through and separate what can and can’t be recycled, the cost outweighs the practicality. So what happens is that mass plastics are thrown into a compactor, baled like hay, strapped, and sent to landfills. Sometimes, the sorters are not even present. They get laid off because they aren’t needed. They produce nothing but more overhead. You’ll still pay the same taxes, but the state and the counties keep the difference.

If you haven’t done so yet, I urge you to read the linked article and extend your own research from there. It sucks to be lied to and scammed, but knowledge is our only weapon, and without that, we’re coyotes that got caught in traps that we should have never been fooled by.