Cards Against Humanity’s ‘Holiday Hole’ is the perfect metaphor for Illinois
Unlike the people who voluntarily have given tens of thousands of dollars toward Cards Against Humanity's Black Friday hole-digging gag, Illinois taxpayers are forced to pour money into the state's ever-growing budget and pension gaps.
For their annual Black Friday stunt, the people behind Cards Against Humanity – the hilarious and uncouth “party game for horrible people” – decided to dig a hole. Literally – they dug a big hole in the ground, which the company promised to continue digging as long as people continued to donate money.
When the digging stopped, more than $100,000 had been contributed to the excavation of this giant, pointless hole.
The creators of Cards Against Humanity, a group of alums from Highland Park High School, have not confirmed where the giant hole is located. But WIFR TV in Rockford has reported the hole might be in the small town of Oregon, Ill., on the banks of the Rock River, just 25 miles from Rockford.
What better location could there be for a gigantic, expensive hole in the ground than Illinois?
The Holiday Hole stunt is the perfect metaphor for Illinois. And it’s just the latest from the company, famous for flouting tradition in the post-Thanksgiving madness that is Black Friday.
In 2013, Cards Against Humanity held an “anti-sale” for Black Friday. While most retailers were cutting prices to draw in holiday bargain hunters, the Cards people raised the price of their product by $5. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t improved. It was the exact same product as before, just $5 more expensive.
They sold “Bullshit” in 2014. Literally. The company’s online store was emptied of the game and any other products and replaced with boxes containing sterilized bull feces, simply labeled “Bullshit.” All 30,000 available boxes of “Bullshit” sold out in a matter of hours.
Then in 2015, the company offered people the opportunity to buy absolutely nothing for the low, low price of $5. Customers paid their $5, and in return they received nothing at all. Selling nothing brought in a grand total of $71,145.
Charging more for the exact same thing? Selling “Bullshit”? People paying for nothing in return?
Sounds a lot like Illinois government.
Take, for example, House Speaker Mike Madigan’s massively unbalanced budget, which passed the Illinois House May 25 and overspent by $7 billion. But it contained nothing in the way of reforms that would put Illinois on track to fixing its massive structural problems. In effect, Madigan was asking Illinoisans to pay more for the same broken government.
But this year’s gigantic hole in the ground is probably the most representative of Illinois government.
Cards Against Humanity’s Claire Friedman, who describes herself the “hole mom” on Twitter, told NPR that the hole project is “set so time gets more expensive the longer we dig. The first dollar paid for 5.5 seconds, now it’ll only get .3.”
And so it is with Illinois’ public pension problem. In December 2015, the unfunded pension liability was $111 billion. Just short of a year later, it was up to $130 billion. It’s getting more expensive with time, as Illinois’ pension hole continues to get deeper and deeper. Just like the Holiday Hole.
Absurd as it is, everything that Cards Against Humanity is doing for its Black Friday stunts is completely voluntary. People are choosing to contribute their hard-earned money to these absurdities.
Illinoisans, on the other hand, are getting stuck with the bill by politicians who are just selling them a lot of expensive nothing.