Thursday, September 11, 2008

Kids Nowadays

I am always talking about my friends. Such is the price of being my friend. Along with the scintillating conversation, good beer, and excellent food at my place comes the possibility of your ideas being discussed (and usually dismissed with prejudice) on a public forum.

Gaius (from here on in, they always will be given Roman names to make them sound noble), is of the opinion that the "kids nowadays are worthless". He piles on every bad trait possible to a human and, most damning, he accuses them of being too fond of their cell phones and video games.

Seeing such calumny makes me rise to the chillun's defense.

My feeling is that these kids (let us consider the age group 10-30 as the group) are in fact different than we were. In truth, most of the bitching that you you hear from the older generations is usually begun with the phrase "when we were kids". So what you have is a bunch of oldsters sitting around, sucking their gums, and reminiscing about the good old days.

And you know what? They were pretty good days. But the reason that they were good is that we were burning through our descendants share of the world's resources just a quick as we could lay our hands on them. So now the kids that we are raising are looking into the future and seeing nothing but a train wreck ahead of them. They have a whining, narcissistic, and greedy set of parents and grandparents (the boomers) that will be sitting in their retirement homes and demanding all that the country produces be given to them for their golden years.

They will be inheriting a world with fewer natural resources and lots of other people in the world having the gall to think that they should have a share of the pie. They will be inheriting a country where the jobs have been outsourced to God knows where. They are already saddled with a truly mind-numbing debt and a government that is attempting to grab more and more power with less and less accountability.

All of these things have happened on our watch.

These kids have got to clean up our mess.

So give them a break. Think about it, we fucked up just about everything, why in God's name would they want to be like us?

-end-

5 comments:

Stephanie in AR said...

Try being the kid who is hard working & believes in earning a paycheck - it isn't easy. I've got two boys who worked at the local chain pizza joint. Their complaints sound like the old timers but stuck as the old timers passed laws making it near impossible to fire dead weight. The younger crew doesn't even have a history to understand why someone thought the law might be a good idea. Then work your buns off to see a good chunk of pay gone because what 17/18/19 yo has dependants? (yeah I know but not around here).

What is funny is that most places have a pre-employment test for prospects to tell how well they will work within the company. Every single hard worker failed that test most wonderfully. Seems being a good worker isn't always compatable with being a huggy team player. Friends recommends got some hired anyway. The last every cook in the place threatened to walkout if he wasn't hired (on friday to boot). Too bad tests count for so much any more. Maybe if the old timers would call corporate or talk to the manager whenever they got good service & praise the good ones could rise and the drecks would get left behind.

'DD' said...

Soooo close ($100.85 at 8:34 am Pacific)....And I believe we made the bet at $147.

http://www.nymex.com/index.aspx

Congrats on the job.

Last time oil was this low, the average price for gasoline was $0.50 less, so we're still getting screwed.

Survival Chick said...

Thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart, for considering someone my age a kid.

God bless you.

Ryan said...

You hit the nail on the head when you said that lots of it was just old people reminiscing about the time that never was. People have been saying something like that for ever. The older they get the wilder the tales are.

Degringolade said...

Hey Dorcas's daddy:

I owe you an Eagle. Where do I send it?