BayouVixen's Blog

I can title a blog post "Today's Young People" because ... well, just look at the picture, I've become an old fart. I still feel young (and many folks tell me I'm still emotionally a teenager), but the fact is I'm well into middle age, nursing a birthday number which I long ago would have described as "ancient."

I saw a blog from a young'un a while ago that, once you managed to sift through the socialist rhetoric, basically said the same thing my fellow 50-ish crowd said when we were 18: "Get ready you old farts, because we're gonna change the world."

The neat thing about being an old fart is that I can look down on today's kids and cut through their logic faster than Bill Clinton can lie.

Take the war in the mideast, for example. Having been a Marine and a veteran of the Desert Storm era, I've chewed that sand and know what today's young soldiers and Marines and others are up against over there. I also know what they're up against over here, because my formative years came during the Vietnam era.

So I see some kid -- college or high school, they all look alike to me any more -- leave some rambling post on one of the discussion boards or blogs about "Why R We Still N Iraq?" We're just there to steal oil, our troops are murdering babies, the Iraqis will be nice if we just leave ... find any argument made by Sean Penn or Susan Sarandon and they'll spew it back to you the same way the hippies did voice-overs of Jane Fonda speeches back in my day.  Yet if you read their posts thoroughly enough, you come to realize that they're all saying one thing: we hate George Bush because we've been told that's the thing to do.

Well kids, we're agreed on that last part anyway. It's Bush's fault we're still stuck there. I supported the invasion of Iraq and the elimination of Saddam Hussein; I wish Bush's daddy had let us do the job back in '91.

But today's kids don't understand that there is a reason we've been stuck in both Iraq and Afghanistan for so long. They don't understand insurgency warfare and they don't understand the implications of what happens when you walk away from it. Guerilla wars take a long, long time to win -- unless you want to take care of things the Roman way, which is to simply crucify entire villages until there aren't enough people left to rebel.

We saw what happened when we gave up on Vietnam: wholesale slaughter on an unprecedented scale in both Vietnam and Cambodia, followed by slavery to a totalitarian state. But they don't teach history to American kids any more.

I've been lectured by some young 'uns about how my generation is wrong for being nationalistic, that "globalization" is here to stay and if we don't like it we just need to move -- off-planet, I'm guessing? Aside from the fact that making statements like that probably has Dubya and his global corporate buddies grinning from ear to fascist ear, it's interesting to see how little experience here in the real world so many of these kids have.

At the age of 14, for example, I started working full-time at a job which, according to President Bush, Americans just won't do any more -- hard, manual, physical labor. I managed to work 40 hours a week to help my mom feed my brothers and still managed to carry a 90-point-something average throughout school (in a day when 100 was the maximum you could get).

Yet today's kids won't work -- in fact, they're not allowed to work. By law. The law prohibits kids from working more than X number of hours a week and limits the hours they can work during school terms, and prevents them from doing some jobs (including the one I performed at the age of 14).

And yet many of them still can't spell words like "are" and "in" and "your" because they're too lazy to add the extra letters, or they insist on changing words ending in "-ers" to "-az" in some worrisome attempt to sound like criminals.

Therein lies another huge difference between the generations. As a teenager growing up dirt poor, I certainly endured temptations. It was tempting to try and snatch food from the store, for example, during the darkest hour in my family's history when Mom didn't always make enough to keep enough food in the house for five hungry boys. But I'd been raised with this absurd notion that stealing is WRONG.

That's no longer a barrier to many of today's young people, it seems. As a retail manager, I can't begin to tell you how many young shoplifters I caught who tried to weasel out of it by saying, "Well, I didn't hurt anybody, your store makes millions of dollars, you won't miss it."

Yet at the heart of all my revulsion at the attitudes so many of today's young folks display is one chilling realization: my generation has to point the finger of blame at itself. We are the complacent fools who didn't question when the great paradigm shift took place in public education that changed schools from places of learning to "human resource development centers." We are the idiots who didn't turn off the TV when we saw gratuitous sex and violence become commonplace and begin influencing children to emulate. We are the stubbornly lazy meat-heads who continued to vote blindly for one or the other of two political parties long after those parties began proving they cared little for our country, only for power.

So to today's younger generation who are striding boldly onto the stage saying they're going to change the world, I say: "Go for it, kid. Do your best."