So, yeah, this self-congratulatory anti-youth screed pretty much makes me want to commit murders.
First off: it isn’t kids who choose to avoid roughhousing or “accidents” or who demand to be put on Little League teams even if they’re shitty at playing baseball or who don’t let kids just wander around. That would be parents who make those choices. If you let kids do dangerous or stupid crap or let them perform activities they might suck at but which are fun they will always do it because they are kids. Frankly, the celebration of the videomaker’s own childhood here is essentially a condemnation of the same generation’s parenting!
Second: parents getting their kids out of trouble at school or with the law isn’t a new thing invented by this generation. For as long as there have been parents, there have been parents who will move heaven and earth in order to make sure their kids avoid any serious repercussions from the stupid shit kids do. Those parents are known as “practically all parents ever.” It’s just that nowadays you see more parents doing it, because more parents have realized that The Authorities are not necessarily on their side. (Thirty years of a drug war might just have something to do with that.) And of course there’s the unspoken issue of privilege rearing its ugly head here.
Oh, and of course there’s a little “what kids play now with is stupid and shitty” because the author grew up without video games and the internet and all those other things that are totally awesome. Bikes are awesome too. One is not exclusive of the other! Most kids today play video games AND ride bikes!
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Some people even play video games while riding bikes!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbMKbykr2Ec
And then it ended with a bit of art FROM a video game.
Also in the old days they didn’t teach high-falutin’ concepts like selection bias. Anyone who didn’t “make it” isn’t around to say so!
Love the implicit statement that the younger generations never produced innovators or scientists to rival the ones this utopian lifestyle raised.
I wonder if that’s because a group who are still in their twenties rarely have world-shattering accomplishments under their belt yet. (Not to denigrate the remarkable achievements of many people in this age category.)
@korafox
The under 30 crowd HAS created innovations but this video trivializes them. “Facebook was a face and a book”
It doesn’t help any that most things created by the last few generations don’t belong to them, they belong to corporations given too much power by the generation that didn’t learn from the Great Depression that their parents and grandparents suffered through.
Really the only generation I have all that much respect for as a whole is the one that won WW2 and even the Greatest Generation is far from perfect what with the casual bigotry and being responsible for the Baby Boomers.
last generation grew up watching tv cowboys not playing jacks & mumbletypeg like prop er kids!!
(so what if they lost a few toes, losing toes, builds character!!))
“We had fights … and learned to get over it”
Tell that to Matthew Sheppard.
“Our actions were our own and consequences were expected. The idea of parents bailing us out…”
I burst out laughing when I heard this part. So that generation is going to do something about the debt and the environment and not kick the can down the line? Own up and solve the problem? The only thing sadder than relying on your parents to solve your problems… is relying on your CHILDREN.
Hmmm, something is wrong with the editing stuff, it marked my comment as spam and locked me out. Maybe I screwed up?
edit: it ate it entirely
“Ugh, kids today are so coddled. I was bullied and whipped and called a fag by my coach, and look at how I turned out!”
-A grown-ass adult who spends some of his limited time on this Earth wishing kids were being made more miserable
And, too, a lot of them didn’t survive. Look at the murder and rape charts from this asshole’s Golden Age down to today. Things have gotten a lot better since Mr. Nostalgia here got out of the game.
also this
Chaucer Doth Tweet @LeVostreGC
Thes dayes, moore and moore folk regret whanne thei were teenageres and hoped the worlde wolde be more lyke Neuromancer yn their lyfteyme.
…one of my best friends had significant exposure to lead-based paint as a child, and suffers many symptoms commonly attributed to lead poisoning. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, though.
Also, the woman commonly cited as the WORST EXAMPLE OF LAWSUIT ABUSE EVER OF COURSE COFFEE IS GOING TO PUT YOU IN THE HOSPITAL WITH THIRD DEGREE BURNS IF YOU SPILL IT was born in the 1910s. So I guess her “no one owes you anything” upbringing didn’t take.
Speaking of the unspoken issue of privilege: it sure is easy to paint a pretty picture of the Baby Boomer decades when you only ever show footage of white boys frolicking and playing baseball as opposed to, say, black kids drinking from Colored Only fountains and being escorted to school by armed guards.
Kat: This. A thousand times this.
And I haven’t gotten to see the video yet (I keep being at work) but now I very much want to watch any of Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” routines. “Life was a carnival! We entertained ourselves! We didn’t need these fancy ‘moving pictures!’ In MY day there was one game, and it was called ‘Stare at the Sun!’ You’d stare up at the sun until your eyeballs burst into flames! And that’s the way it was and we LIKED it!”
Brian Smith: watch the Monty Python version it’s funnier
Kat: I kind of thought of the black kids being escorted to school as a positive thing. I mean it’s bad that they had to be, but the protection was there for them when they needed it
Jason: I think Kat’s point is that said baby boomer lived in an era where kids needed to be protected from other kids as well as adults by soldiers with guns. Just because they were black.
Yeah – Baby Boomers who get all “kids today suck” can go fuck themselves six ways from sunday. I’ve got nothing against Boomers as a generation, but the exemplars who give us crap like this can seriously shut up now and go away.
I will certainly grant that most kids today play video games (is there any doubt?), but I would be very surprised if most (as in, more than 50%) ride a bike. The vast majority of people I see on bikes in my neck of the woods are adults.
Pretty sure 10 year olds aren’t the ones who initiate all those frivolous lawsuits either. Pretty sure that would be the Baby Boomer parents who do that
“more parents have realized that The Authorities are not necessarily on their side” was there EVER a time when most people really thought Authority was on their side? Really?
“Was there EVER a time when most people really though Authority was on their side? Really?”
Well . . . yeah. I’ve been told by a number of people much older than myself that, up until approximately Watergate, most folks pretty much took as a given the idea that those in power knew what they were doing and were at least attempting to do the right thing for the country. Clearly not true of EVERYONE, but more common that you’d think.
“Frivolous” lawsuits are a myth perpetuated by the wealthy and corporations to encourage tort reform and the like. As a way to keep the poor from having a legal means of fighting the power of said wealthy individuals and corporations…
The important thing was, I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time.
The Consumer Attorneys of California web page about the well-known (but rarely understood) McDonald’s coffee case: http://www.caoc.org/index.cfm?pg=facts
The most significant, I think, is that all she really wanted was $20,000 to cover her medical expenses. McDonalds never offered more than $800. The jury, on hearing the facts, decided that McDonalds blatant disregard for safety (after 700 similar cases in 10 years) was grounds for slapping the company with a monumental punitive damage award. The final disposition of the case was a private settlement.
If you don’t like their page, a quick search via Google will find you a range of alternate pages, almost all of which report the exact same facts.
(https://www.google.com/search?q=mcdonalds+coffee+lawsuit&oq=mcdonalds+coffee+lawsuit)
In the modern era schools are more segragated than in the era of formal legal segregation
There’s no need for the guns because the racists won
And of course lots of kids from those times didn’t make it. Because they died in accidents, swallowed pills, drowned in quarries… and now that is exceedingly rare. Because we have all these “stupid” rules.
And was it me, or were the only pictures of black kids ones were they were behind bars or with cops?
I’m in the UK and my kids play (ice) hockey – old fashioned ideas of winners and losers still apply there
the schoolkids in my rather diverse neighborhood ride bikes, and scooters, and fish in the creek, and play in the park, a=and i really dont think this is some kind of ISLAND OUT OF TIME we’ re stuck in….
I was born in the Seventies, and I can’t really relate to this video at all (if my dad had his way, I’d be more like this dude’s ideal… but that was never going to happen for a variety of reasons).
Basically, I was a geeky weirdo who almost got thrown into the “special” class because I was afraid of my crazy, mean kindergarten teacher. I was one of those kids the “normal” kids described in that monologue would have spent all their time physically and verbally abusing for being different. With the added drawback of not being some kind of supergenius, so I didn’t get to invent something cool or become a .dotcom millionaire or anything. So, yeah…
Having said that, I still think young people suck. I don’t see what’s so great about Instagram, or white kids in my town pretending to be gangsters, or “ironic” Millennials constantly dissing anything I remember fondly on the Internet. I have no idea why young people in my area listen to the crappy rap and dance music they insist on blasting out of their cell phones when you can go on Spotify and easily find stuff that is ten times better.
It gets old constantly seeing younger people talk on the Internet like everybody my age and older were a bunch of terminally unhip, racist, sexist, bigoted douchebags. Sure, there were people like that. But there were also cool people who created stuff that people still like today and decent folks who just watched a lot of M*A*S*H reruns. We weren’t all evil idiots.
Meanwhile, maybe because I’m getting older, it is hard not to see anybody under 25 as anything other than selfish jerks who care way too much about things like smartphone specs and whatever the other status symbols of the moment happen to be.
Hipsters can be annoying. Wannabe gangsters can be really annoying. Nerds can be annoying with all that “geek cred” and “fake nerd” nonsense. I don’t enjoy talking about fantasy baseball, or the Kardashians or other celebrities they routinely mock on TMZ. I like songs that actually have melodies. I haven’t been able to enjoy superhero comics for about 12 years now. Basically… get off my lawn and don’t come back until you like some music that has live drumming or maybe some guitar solos.