My friends inform me that my expectations are too high. Which is probably often true and I’d be much better off just getting over it. So one of these days I’ll make peace with the fact that it’s too much to expect world peace, or that people have some (apparently highly uncommon) common sense, or that Massachusetts drivers know and respect traffic laws. In the meantime I promise to complain about it less. It’s probably a good thing I started doing Yoga … 
On the flip side, there is such a thing as too low expectations. For example when kids graduate from college and don’t know that France is an independent country (which came as a big surprise to a classmate of mine at a regionally ranked liberal arts college, who was about to graduate and become a school teacher!!!) or have no idea there were two separate German countries for a long time and not even that many years ago. I see this partially as a result of collectively low expectations of what every child should learn in high school (yes, high school, not college, and yes, every child, not just the rich children going to private school). So, one fine day in the future when I have kids, I will expect them to get a solid education in history, geography, sciences, math and arts and learn the proper grammar & spelling of their native language and at least one foreign language. And if that’s too much to expect, we might just have to consider moving to Finland, China, Japan or Korea, where the expectations of what a high school graduate should know are a bit greater.
Great Expectations,
Two books I read years ago (oh, how I date myself - like a tree) “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James Loewen, or “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn. It’s all one big advertisement unfortunately.
Greater Expectations
My friends also inform me that apparently I’m really not a very good writer. A previous version of this entry sounded like I was hiding a bunch of kids in a closet. Since I don’t want to get yelled at by Oprah for lying in my blog, I straightened out the language.
Absolutely. If we don’t have high expectations, then we are setting ourselves up for underachievement. This is true on an individual level and on a societal level. So we should expect world peace. It may not occur in our lifetime, but we need to expect it in order to work toward that goal. And maybe it starts with expecting that fellow drivers on the road behave courteously. We should all expect respect from one another.