39 years ago Happy New Year, Charlie Brown! premiered on CBS. It was the 30th network prime time special based on Peanuts and the last project helmed by Peanuts animater Bernard Gruver due to his passing away in June of 1985.
Charlie Brown, as always, has something to teach us.
He was stressed out, he missed out, he made the best of it, celebrated not failing, and was given more stress.
The Plot
On the last day of school before Christmas break, Charlie Brown’s teacher assigned a book report. Not just any book report. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace would have to be read, reported on, and turned in after Christmas break. This stressed Charlie Brown out.
While trying to digest the Russian literary crucible exceeding 1,200 pages, he was facing pressure about Peppermint Patty’s big New Years Eve Party. The whole gang would be there and everyone was talking about it. As it got closer to New Years Eve, he made an attempt to invite his crush, the mysterious Little Red Headed Girl, to the party while trying to find ways to better understand Tolstoy.
He tried to find everything from audiobooks to video games based on the novel, but to no avail. At the party Charlie Brown went to the front stoop to finish reading the book. He fell asleep and missed the magic moment of midnight. The next day he also found out Linus danced with the Little Red Haired Girl. He could have danced with her, she was there!
Charlie presses through and turns in the best report he can. His best was a D minus. Charlie Brown celebrates this. It is not a total failure!
But then something else happens; the entire class is assigned to read and report on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The animated classic ends with Charlie Brown being stressed out all over again.
Wah Wah Wah Wah!
Work life balance is something that Gen X is largely seen as responsible for making a priority. Moments like this installment was written by Charles Schultz knowing that Gen X would be watching and understand the pressure Charlie Brown was facing. We saw our Boomer parents working impossibly long hours and knew it was not for us. Like the Hoyt Axton song, if you work your fingers to the bone, what do you get? Boney fingers!
Adults were represented by a trombone to keep the focus on the words, thoughts, and experiences of the children, not the authority. And what did the authority figure do?
Christmas break had an additional pressure interrupting the life portion of the work life balance.
Wah wah wah is always there somewhere in our lives testing the limits of our ability to take delight. It’s stressful and can make an event like a party feel like an obligation due to the real obligation thrown at you.
Creative Avenues
We have to admire that Charlie Brown knew his limits and sought alternative avenues to understand the material, even though it did not work out.
It is perfectly acceptable to not be able to understand something and try to find other means to understand.
Missing Out
Charlie Brown was stressed out and that led to missing out. While everyone else was having fun a mere feet away, Charlie Brown kept trying to power through Russian literature to the point of physical and mental exhaustion. He missed not only the magic moment and the party, but an opportunity to spend some time with his crush and maybe even dance with her. How often do we miss out on what we want to do in life because we have lost balance and life is missed because of work?
Celebrating Not Failing
The 80s was the beginning of the toxic industry of motivational self help. We manifest success and set high bars of that success. Parents yell at children for C’s and D’s as if it was a failure. Bosses or clients will look at end results and judge all too harshly the best someone can do. Think about how many times someone makes a mistake at a diner or drive through, your social media friends tells the world they got pickles on their burger when they said no pickles! This failure does not deserve to make a livable wage according to them. There is no room for less than perfect.
But Charlie Brown has something wonderful to teach us. He dared to celebrate the D minus! It was not a total failure and it was the best he was able to do. For him it was good enough and he allowed himself to be proud of that.
Wah Wah Wah!
The story ends as it began. Another large scale arduous assignment. That is as real as fiction can get. After one obligation assigned by an authority to interrupt the balance of life with stress there is another one.
Let’s be honest, 4th grade is not an appropriate age to be burdened with reading, understanding, and interpreting Russian Literature! And that is part of the point. The burden assigned by authority was too big and too arduous and the proper resources did not exist for every person assigned the task to complete it and enjoy their lives with friends, family, or even the best pet.
Learn From Chuck
I wish I had a magic formula for finding the proper work life balance. The toxic wasteland known as LinkedIn is full of wah wah wah voices speaking of loyalty and shaming the desire for balance with weird terms like quiet quitting when someone does their job and then wants to live life. Education systems and our ableist views have little to no room for divergence of abilities and sometimes fails to realize an expectation may even be unfair.
But do your best. Be happy with knowing that was all you could do.
The one thing I wish Charlie Brown had done differently was to enjoy time with friends, the party, and get to know this mysterious redhead! I suspect he would have had a good time and still achieved not failing.
But the greatest thing I hope we can do is to not see Charlie Brown as the loveable loser, but the one with something to teach all of us in the wake of his D minus. Celebrate and enjoy having done the best you could regardless the result! The assignment was not appropriate and while he had an interrupt in his work life, he could not access the authority for help in better understanding or resources. He was on his own.
And for the parents and the grandparents, maybe we need to remember this episode when Gen Z or Gen Alpha did the best they could against all the odds and got a D.
Storytime!
When my kid was in High School, one of their friends came over to my condo after school one day emotionally wrecked. She did the best she could and got a C minus in a class and her parents were cruel to her. They accused her of not taking her “academic career” seriously and not respecting what they do for her. They called her lazy and silly and accused her of not trying.
As she sobbed, I held her and told her C’s still get degrees. As I listened to her struggles I realized she had a learning disability. In 20 minutes I could figure out something we later had verified. And even with the hard scientific evidence it was not her parents, but me and a social worker who had to ensure she had what she needed to succeed in school.
She did not fail them, they failed her. Her mom is a teacher and from what I hear still runs about social media speaking about how caring and compassionate she is while her kids are ungrateful for her efforts. What effort? Memes and posts about how awesome her god (little g) and church are?
The useless wah wah wah’s did not see any of this, but I did because I focused on the kid, not the adult, just as Schultz taught me to. Her C minus was a herculean effort without the proper resources and support. It should have been celebrated as opposed to shamed.
Do the best you can, and try to make time to enjoy life. There will always be another obligation. “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
Stay Totally Awesome!
Stay True to You!
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