Little kids of today: It's not their fault I hate them

The 80's may have been a giant economic clusterfuck spurred on by massive cocaine use, but I am proud to have been a child of the 80's. Why? Because little kids today are getting dumber by the day thanks to Pokemon and new-age parenting.

The idea for this article came on my trip home from school. First, I was waiting at the bus stop for the free airport bus. So I'm waiting there, and there is a couple of yuppies with a young child standing in front of me. It had been snowing, so there was salt strewn all over the sidewalk and edges of the road. The parents are standing around, looking perturbed that they have to take something as lowly as a bus, while the child frolicks at their feet. Only by frolicking, I mean he was picking up salt crystals off the road and eating them while his parents lazily watched, and WARNED HIM NOT TO GET TOO CLOSE TO THE ROAD! Jesus tap-dancing Christ, if I tried to eat rock salt (which may or may not contain snow-melting material less benign than salt), my parents would have smacked it out of my hand and said, "What are you, stupid?" I'm afraid that the next generation of kids will have destroyed all of their brain cells with rock salt before they hit puberty - and it's all thanks to these hippy parents who raise free-range kids without any discipline.

The second impetus for this was sitting in line to get on my plane (it's a $40 flight, so don't rip on me for being rich) back home. There's a kid screaming his fool head off while his dad is on the cell phone yakking about football. Okay, after the all important "garbage-in-garbage-can," it is helpful to remember that if a kid is crying, it's probably because they need your attention. But people are too busy these days, so they just let their kid scream. Even my parents, who are long since out of the business of "raising children" per se, wonder how parents today can simply ignore their kids when they're shredding the eardrums of those around them. Furthermore, I see kids who are 6 or 7 screaming - haven't parents (and society for that matter) made it clear that screaming in a public place is something of a "no-no?" Shut these kids up or at least slip them some Nyquil if they can't go outside the house without hitting 90 decibels.

Another reason it sucks to be a kid these days is that kids no longer learn anything from television. They watch Pokemon and see a bunch of seizure-inducing figments of some Japanese mental patient's imagination running around on-screen for a half hour a day. Or they watch Yu-Gi-Oh duel with malevolent geriatrics... that sounds pretty cool right? Wrong. They duel with trading cards ... Karl Marx must be convusing in his pressboard coffin. Don't even start with the "Dave, how do you know these details if you hate those shows so much." I hoped it wouldn't come to this, but I must rat out one of my college roommates who watches this show with alarming regularity. The minimal knowledge I have of this show comes from how he explained the show to someone else. Anyway, the point is that kids no longer learn anything on TV. Gone are the days of watching Sesame Street and learning such important concepts like numbers and letters, and how to deal with simple social situations, like with grouchy people (Oscar the Grouch), gay people (Bert & Ernie), slow people (Snuffaluppagus), manic-depressives (Elmo), and people addicted to crank (Grover).

Another reason we children of the 80's can say "sucks to be you" to the kids of today is that our parents weren't scared shitless by the news media. The other day, I was in a store and this father acted as if his 3-year-old gave him the finger or something when the kid wandered a foot away from his side. He scolded his son, saying "Don't you know how easy it would be for you to get abducted?!" Chances are... no, because the kid doesn't know what the fuck "abducted" even means! Do parents really want their kids to grow up that quickly, so quickly that they have to worry about getting abducted and molested every time they leave the house? Apparently so. They're doing it because what they see on TV every day makes them think that kids are getting picked off the street like half-smoked cigarettes on a DC sidewalk. This country is infatuated with the sensational, and thus, we are convincing ourselves that our kids aren't safe anywhere, anytime. And it's not the fault of the networks, either; it's our fault for turning off the TV when they show real news. We're perpetuating this by making networks go to the lowest-common-denominator when it comes to news: child abductions and murders of beautful/rich white women. Because no one will watch them if they talk about elections in a country the average idiot American can't pronounce.

So in the end, sorry kids of today, but you're all screwed because of your hippie parents and Japanese cartoons.