Today’s Youth, Tomorrow’s Nightmare
Last weekend while visiting Las Vegas to attend a niece’s wedding, we managed to catch a glimpse of the twenty-somethings who will one day be running the remains of what used to be the country of our own youth. Needless to say, we came away less than encouraged by that which we saw.
Generational fears of generational progeny are nothing new. Our grandparents doubtlessly shook their heads when watching their children jitterbug to the sounds of Tommy Dorsey. Then we watched as our father was convinced, on the night of February 9th, 1964, that the entire world was “going to hell” because of four “mop-tops”, clad in suits and ties, mind you, who were preforming on “the Ed Sullivan Show”. Later on, we shook our own heads when our own children began “Keeping up with the Kardashians”, and we thought to ourselves, “What the f—?” These are all cultural phenomena, stretched across four generations, but this is not what we are referring to when discussing what it is that we fear from these twenty-somethings, today….no, not by a long shot.
We took the opportunity to go to breakfast at 5:00 AM, PDT- largely because we were still operating on east coast time and we usually eat breakfast around 8:00 AM, EDT, and hadn’t made the adjustment. In the hotel’s restaurant, a place called the Hash House, we noticed bunches of twenty-somethings staggering in, some of whom (the girls) were dressed up like “hoes” and some of whom (the guys) were dressed up as “gangstas”- but, again, it wasn’t their dress, nor their excessive use of cosmetics, nor their elongated beards, nor their baggy clothing that we found so disturbing- it was their behavior. They acted precisely the way they dressed- staggering into the restaurant, pouring liquor out of their own bottles into paper cups, dropping the f-bombs loudly and with such frequency as to outnumber all of the other words spoken in between, and falling out of their chairs where they sat, or attempted to sit.
Mind you, these were not the poor, unwashed unfortunates that one might find on city streets, all over the country, but young adults staying at a pricey Las Vegas hotel, presumably on their parents’ dime, celebrating the end of their spring semesters in college. Just listening to their conversations conveyed that these were not educated college students exploring the world of adulthood, but rather indoctrinated narcissists pushing the limits, as if doing so were the veritable ends in, and of, themselves. Many of these (forgive the term) kids, sported a king’s ransom in ink, on their skin, and a pharaoh’s treasure of all sorts of implements piercing their faces, as one might pierce a pin cushion. The thought occurred to us that once out of school, these kids would stand about as much of a chance getting a decent job, as we would in making the Baltimore Ravens’ active roster in our mid-fifties.
These are the kids that have come of age believing they are entitled to all that life has to offer, by sheer virtue of their having been born. They have cruised through schools, without having learned. They have slid through college, without having been tested, and they have done so as the result of student loans, for which they fully expect to be excused, and/or their parents’ largesse for which they are unappreciative. Work? Hell, they have never done hard work, and don’t expect to, either. Patriotism? That’s an idea that is now out of date, politically incorrect, and something associated with white racists, and senile old people of all races. Responsibility? Yeah, right. Respect? They call each other “niggah” and “bitch” with no regard to those who stand and sit in immediate proximity.
In other words, in their world, others do not matter, and when society has sunk to a place where others do not matter, then society has sunk to a point of no return, which is why we find trouble sleeping at night, for fear of all that tomorrow might well bring.
In short, we as a society are imperiled from our own excess- and the lack of responsibility we should have otherwise imparted onto the children we raised.
-Drew Nickell, 21 May 2015
© 2015 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved