Things that really .. really piss me off: part XIV

Kids today

My dad is in his late sixties. When he was a kid, my grandparents were so poor, they couldn't even afford to buy meat once a week, so toys were out of the question.

If they found an old tire, a length of rope or some other piece of industrial waste from the local coal mines, they were lucky.

That said, they enjoyed their lives.

There were seasons for everything; cricket, kites, marbles, football, conkers, sledging, skipping .. the list goes on.

Fast forward several decades to my generation, and while I was more fortunate than my dad and his contemporaries, I still retained that make-do attitude.

We’d routinely make trollies / go-karts, which would consist of a two pair of wheels from an old pram, three planks of wood, some old washing line, a few nails, an old milk crate and a red-hot fire poker.

We made do.

Like my dad and his mates, we would disappear into the many surrounding local woods for hours on end, often making our way back home, caked in dirt and sludge in the approaching twilight hours of late evening, our parents desperate to get us bathed and to bed for school the next morning.

Our clothes were often shabby and torn, but we had our heads filled with inventive, creative ideas about how do make the best of what we had.

That was the life we had.

Fast forward just several years and see how things have changed.

Kids today and more interested in looking cool than having fun. And that isn’t my comment, although I thoroughly agree with it. That was an observation from a seaside clown who was interviewed in the newspaper last year sometime.

Kids today are more interested in being shod in the most expensive clothes and having the most expensive toys, yet still they wander around the streets bored out of their tiny little minds, vandilizing, pissing in shop / store doorways like a tramp / vagrant and generally being a pain in the arse.

And what might you get from them if you asked them why they don’t go away and do something else?

“We’re bored. We’ve got nothing to do.”

They live in a time with greater opportunities than either my dad or myself had .. times two!

They have loads to do, but they have such shockingly small attention spans and such a complete lack of gumption and aptitude that they couldn’t find their own arse with both hands.

And even if they did have an epiphany, a singular idea of what to do with their feckless, oafish and wasted lives, they probably wouldn’t do it because they couldn’t look cool enough doing it.

Get their clothes dirty? You’ve got to be kidding me, right?

If you challenge these kids and ask them why they doing something wrong or criminally stupid, they sort of stop and you see this glazed expression drift across their faces.

They’re trying to make sense of what you’ve just asked them, but because there’s no default foundation of what’s right & wrong to be found anywhere in their empty heads, they simply cannot answer you.

The kids come from parents who piss their money away on lottery scratch-cards, cheap booze & cigarettes from abroad and then sit around all day doing fuck-all while their kids run riot and then blame the teachers when they get into bother day in, day out.

Not all kids are like this, but there’s enough of them to be a constant pest and make enough front pages in the press. We call them Hoodies or Chavs, I just called them braindead, seems appropriate...