Kids Today or Everyday?

This world is not the one I grew up in is among the few universal sentiments we have left, no matter the culture. Kids today aren’t what we were, and oh, what will the future hold? And can’t we just go back to that easy time? It’s disingenuous crap. 

Me in the 1980s, naturally teased.

“Back then,” we tell ourselves, “It all made sense. Kids were kids and dogs ate dog food.” Queue the puffed up chest. “We had it hard, but we had roller rinks, leg warmers and MTV. What else did we need?”

We hit the juncture where the world, as it has evolved, is difficult to comprehend. It was simpler in our childhood homes. Someone else paid the bills, worried about the adult things. We didn’t know everything, but we weren’t supposed to. And by we, I mean me. 

Beyond geo political turmoil and weather related struggles, we have different concerns at different ages. Younger people are seeking out their futures, sampling all the tracks. We older folk are holding on tight, drafted into a war of attrition no one ever wins. They want to correct; we want to save. It is the wheel of life grinding, trying to make up some distance.

Having said that, these social media amplified, supposedly “aware” kids have all the righteousness and little of the knowledge, which they’ve decided is “non essential for understanding.” They present the way their wind is blowing, and expect the rest of us to find shelter. It is terrifying. But I’m also kinda jealous of such single minded ignorance.

When I was a kid, we were worrying about nuclear annihilation and gas shortages. Real things. Understandable. American values—Sorry, it’s easy to fall into.

In my hyper vigilant but misspent youth, I listened to the adults ramble on and on about how Gen Xers were ruining the world with their blatant disregard for the values they held so dear. Our hippie parents aged into uptight ones, man. According to them, they cared about sex, drugs, and rock & roll, while we were concerned with Jordache Jeans, Madonna and how far out we could tease our hair and without becoming flammable. 

On the other hand, I was actually petrified of nuclear war and dying of AIDS. They weren’t asking kids to “appreciate” their phobias back then. Instead, they were inflicting them. Enough to go around. Sure, they were softer on us than their parents had been on them, but they’d most likely find our parenting unrecognizably lenient. And by ours, I mean, mine. 

I studied history in college in simpler days. You had a good guy and a bad guy. You were either a Redcoat or a Revolutionary; a union soldier or a slave holder; a Nazi or one of us. Never a fan of suspense, what I found so comforting about the past was that there was a conclusion. The future might be unknowable, but the past had, at least, a text book ending. It made perfect sense to me. 

Boy was I wrong.

History and what follows is not a story whose conclusion is already established. It gets shifted and rewritten generation to generation, depending on its audience and its teachers. Like the bible. Or the constitution. 

History isn’t a solid no matter how it appears. It is slippery as liquid and steamy as vapor. Given that, what does that make the future? How can we hold onto the righteous pain of the past without becoming its generational victim? 

No, answer? That’s a shame. There are a couple of billion people who’d like to know. Is the future we’re staring into, worse than the past we’ve endured? It depends on who gets asked.

What was I talking about? History? Kids today? They do have better memories. And they look so good. I spent hours getting ready in the 1990s in the bloom of my own youth. Now it’s five minutes and I don’t care that I look like shit. An evolution I appreciate more than I can say.

I was introduced to the fibrous loofah brush of the past by the half hippie, half communist social studies high school teachers of New York City in the 1980s. Their mission was to give us the nuance in the facts they’d been spoon feeding us since Kindergarten. 

We sat in rows of metal desks, passing notes, trying to stay awake. 

“Authority lies. Question it. Put as much as you can in a 401K and I’ll see you in the courtyard for a smoke.” They were different times.

This was my first exposure to critical thinking, an inkling of editorial excitement. I sank into it, while it showed me the great joy of finding a different angle, challenging myself, taking in different perspectives, pushing into narratives that weren’t my own. I thought this could change the world. Instead, it’s mostly left me worried. And a frustrated novelist.

“Don’t down the Kool Aid,” Mr. Zaza and Mr. Cohen told us. “The man will screw you,” they warned. “Capitalism stands on the backs of laborers. Invest in the stock market!” 

Far be it from me to claim that some kid in their bedroom doesn’t count in the centuries long discourse of the Middle Eastern conflict, or that Russia isn’t, in fact, liberating Ukraine? After all, they sometimes followed entire reddit threads.

All this is to say, please don’t quote TikTok to me as a primary source. Some of them are really well done, but it took me a long time to crawl out from beneath the conservative, aggressively heterosexual rabbit hole I fell into after I liked one country song sung at a county fair. And please let’s not talk about the vegan dumpling making path I’ve gone down. I’m not really proud.

Every generation has to find their way, fight their demons, wear their leg warmers. It’s the circle of life and all. Though even here I offer a word of caution. Those porn ‘staches and mullets you gentlemen are sporting these days, will not hold up well in the pictures. And when your kids roll their eyes at you, and tell you that you know nothing and you ruined the world that they now have to fix, I might be taking my pills crushed into applesauce but I’ll still be laughing.