My Generation By Jesse http://slicer69.tripod.com "Kids coming up nowadays, don't even know how to tie down a pumpkin." Or so saith Foghorn Leghorn. That seems to be the feeling that many adults have about the younger generations. Young people these days. Sigh. They don't know anything about hard work, money, respect, manners. You know, the older generation (I'm twenty-two at the moment) might have a point there. No one in my time had to worry about a draft, a big war, a great depression. I didn't have to walk up hill through the snow to school. Looking through the new paper there are countless accounts of today's youth destroying property, trying dangerous drugs, killing people and generally acting stupid. Take, for example, the young man who beat the snot out of his mother with a base ball bat. His own mother! Or the fourteen year old girl that came home after a year of doing heroin, coke and meth. Home to mother, finally, after prostituting herself for drugs. Shootings in schools, drug use, prostitution, wild, underage sex parties. That's right, my generation is impatient, wild and has no respect. So, to all of you people of the previous generation, who might be reading this, I have three words for you. "Pot", "Kettle" and "Black". Where do you think my generation learned its behaviour? Oh, I see. TV. Of course, which is owned by your generation. Who is to blame for the state our society is in? Government? The government is run by your generation, not mine. I'm barely old enough to vote. The Internet? Who owns all of those web sites? The generation before mine. This leads me to believe that my generation picked up its bad habits from (or because of) the one before. I hear people talk about how out of control today's kids are. Yeah, well, I didn't march with Martin Luther King Jr. or rally against Vietnam, okay? I didn't partake in free love, boundless amounts of pot or coke. The traditional of rebelling against authority happened long before my generation. Going back to my early example of youngsters out of control, now. That kid who beat his mom with the bat? I think he might have had the right idea. I mean, the crazy lady had drug problems and threatened to kill him. Don't you think that a few death threats from someone on coke demands a little action? Yeah, I think a few whacks with the bat might have knocked some sense into her....one can hope. As for the girl prostituting herself for meth? She left home to live on the streets when she was twelve. She had a boyfriend, was living on the street and using coke by the time she was thirteen. What's wrong with the picture? I think there might have been something wrong with her home life and the community in general. What kind of person sells coke to a thirteen year old? What sort of freak buys a thirteen year old girl? A sick one. Lastly, what sort of mom (no sign of dad in this picture) lets her daughter run the roads and try hard drugs with some pimply faced kid? On to personal experience. I work in customer service. I see a lot of people from every age group every day. The rudest, laziest and the ones with the worst spending habits are those over the age of twenty-five. Yeah, okay, some of the nicest are also in the twenty-five to forty range. This is a group of extremes. Yes, people my age can be a pain, but it happens a lot less than with the older crowd. It ticks me off to no end when a person thinks that he or she is better than myself because of our respective ages. Age has little to do with it. There are a lot of good, nice people out there. There are also a lot of ass holes. Age doesn't seem to be overly relevant. For example, the other day (it was a cold, wintry day) a man came in with a sky mask on. Now, since I work in a convenience store, this is a "no no". I walked over and asked him if he'd take the mask off, please. His response? "No, I'm not taking it off." Now, granted, I recognized him; he's in every week. But...there are some things you just don't do. You don't yell "Fire" in a theatre. You don't pull on Superman's cape and you don't walk into a bank or convenience store with a sky mask on your face. It's for security, peace of mind and (hopefully) common sense. So, I'd like to take this moment to point out, clarify even, that the previous generation is full of good people. Loving, caring people. Sometimes they're hard to find, but they're there. But there are so many...so very many that are cold, close minded, bitter and angry. My generation, has to deal with that, while being expected to do better. Well, show us some good role models and we'll see what we can do. Since I started with a quote, I'll end with one. This one from Fight Club (the movie) "Advertisements have us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. The great war is a spiritual war. The great depression is our lives. We were raised by television to believe that we'd be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars -- but we won't. And we're learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed-off."