Believe it or not, I’ve been trying to be more positive about life, the universe, and pretty much everything lately.

It’s not easy because admittedly I tend to be fairly cynical in nature, but I’m trying for my own mental sanity, anyways…

So a simple phrase kind of rubbed me the wrong way this morning in a random meme post on Facebook – “Your child is NOT a special snowflake.” It was written from the perspective of a teacher dealing with all sorts of parents expecting often times ridiculous treatment for their kids, which I’m sure happens … yet I think there’s something that’s still lost by making a blanket statement like this.

The truth is, kids are special snowflakes … to their own parents at the very least, even if from your perspective they just seem to blend in with a thousand other obnoxious kids. I’ve already noticed myself how other people’s kids can be absolutely awful while you tend to tolerate your own for similar behavior merely because, well, they’re your own. That annoying kid who keeps kicking your chair isn’t just some random asshole kid when he’s your own … he’s also the little guy that you snuggle with and build Legos with and sing goofy songs in the car with – there’s more to him than just the misbehavior that you may unfortunately be experiencing at any given moment.

There’s enough homogenization everywhere else in the world that everyone will all experience firsthand soon enough by employers and corporations and a cynical world in general – why are people so eager to cut these kids down and tell them that they’re no different than anybody else so early on in their lives? Find a better way to teach kids about manners and equality and kindness than by telling them that they aren’t special, even if you’ve become so cynical in your own life that it’s how you view most people that you encounter.

You’re not any more special than anybody else shouldn’t be an excuse for random strangers to be rude to each other simply because that’s how everybody else treats them.

If you go back to the original metaphor, a mountain of snow may contain millions of millions of snowflakes, but that doesn’t make any individual snowflake any less beautiful if you look at it up close or even under the enhancement of a microscope. I know that it’s a trendy thing now to hate on millennials for allegedly having been so babied to the point of not knowing how to exist in society … or at least not our society that seems to be filled with older generations that don’t seem to have a lot of sympathy for the children who they once boasted were their future, ironically.

Maybe instead of cutting people down and being so negative by lumping all of these youth together under a label that was imposed by their parents and grandparents anyways, we’d see more benefit to society by taking that time to appreciate the individuals for what makes each of them special … or at the very least save the criticism for a time when it’s actually deserved and not just miserly bitching because you insist that your generation was better than theirs…

The two embryos you see here are just like the other 108 billion people who have lived on this planet before them, but they’re very special to me because with a little luck here in a few months they’re going to be born into this world as my twin sons.

Chances are they may live completely ordinary lives, barely coming into contact with a thousand or two people in their lifetimes and remaining strangers to the entire rest of the population … just two snowflakes among 10 billion.

But special nonetheless.