The perfect circle
I had what I would consider a very ordinary upbringing back in the 50s and 60s.
I had good times and bad times. I was bullied and teased. I got into fights. I got into some pretty hairy escapades where it’s a wonder I escaped with nothing worse than a few scars. In other words, I was like millions of others having a perfectly normal childhood.
I came out of it reasonably balanced with a fair education, not only in the academic sense but with high marks in the university of life. I was ready for the rough and tumble and the dog eat dog life ahead of me.
I sit back now and look on in amazement at the way kids are being brought up nowadays. They are wrapped in cotton wool from birth. Nothing must be allowed put them in any sort of danger whatsoever. Even worse, they mustn’t even run the risk of any danger. They are coddled and protected and we are told time and time again that all protections and nanny laws are for the sake of the children.
As a result of all this, they are growing up into spineless, molly-coddled whinging little brats. The world owes them everything and if they don’t get what they want they go running back to mammy. But they are “grown up” now so mammy isn’t there any more so they go running to their friends on Twitter or Facebook, crying that life isn’t fair and they miss being “safe”. They want a Pollyanna World where we are all sickly sweet and polite to each other and every word must be considered just in case it might offend someone. At the rate we are going, the number of words that may cause “offence” to someone will soon exceed the number of words in the dictionary.
The latest word word to cause great offence and mental trauma is of course “snowflake”. The irony of this seems to completely escape them. They are whinging about being called whingers. “Stop calling us horrible names, just because we don’t like being called horrible names“. They don’t seem to realise that the more they complain about being called Snowflakes the more we will call them Snowflakes. You couldn’t make it up!
This is the future we are looking at here – the captains of industry, the leaders of men. These are the people who will hold the reigns of the future.
God help us.
They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in my day.
“”I had good times and bad times.””
Did you blame them on the boogie?
The boogie woogie was the start of the decline!
Could have been the moonlight?
Or the sunshine?
Your upbringing sounds very similar to mine in the 60’s and 70’s, Grandpa. What ever happened to good old fashioned common sense and learning from the school of hard knocks?
Today’s parents aren’t raising children to grow up and be productive members of society, they’re keeping pets, for goodness sake!
Well, at least I realize from your post that the problem is not isolated to American culture.
Welcome! In those days gone by we had such things as fun and learning from experience. The more dangerous it was, the better and we learned the hard way, all the better to remember.
The problem nowadays is that “social media” allows for widespread dissemination of idiocy like a mental plague across the planet. It only takes a couple of snowflakes to cause an avalanche.
Yes, it’s alarming.
I’ve worked in the same (engineering) company for 3 decades and in that time seen the workforce degenerate from people capable of taking and understanding (simple) instructions and getting on with their work relatively unaided, to almost untrainable milksops, who cannot cope alone with the simplest of tasks, and who require constant affirmations to stop over-emotional behavior. Plus, the very idea of working without a phone beside them is anathema – you’d think I was asking for their contents of their wallets from the reactions. I should add that these are the best candidates available after turning away 9/10 for a lack of basic literacy, numeracy and being able to make verbal sense. (But they all “know” CO2 is bad, bad, bad!)
Hi Grandad, and hope your suspension id fixed and the chassis undamaged 🙂
Re “Kids nowadays”: I was at a neighbour’s fireworks do last month. My neighbour’s brother in law had his kids fitted out with glow-in-the-dark thingies around their necks so he could see where they were. He was constantly telling them to “be careful” about the bonfire, sticks, darkness, etc. The neighbour’s 5 year old kid was sent back to the house to get some scissors (for why I’ve forgotten). I said, deadpan like, “be careful, don’t run with the scissors!” – and they all fucking agreed like I was serious!!!
FFS: when I did the neighbourhood fireworks party I used to make flaming torches out of 2×1 batten, rags and parafin. The kids (obviously under some supervision) got to wave them about (loverly “woosh woosh” noise) before throwing them on the fire to start it. Not many died.
Happy days, how sadly lost…
“These are the people who will hold the reins of the future.” No they won’t. They’ll either grow up fast or get sidelined.
And most probably our grandparents whined about us and our parents. Only difference is they whined in something called a pub.
Thing I can never understand from way back when I woz a kid is the ‘hard work ethic’. I was forever finding ways to avoid or negate hard work with effective work or do nothing. A couple of decades of paid employment in the defence (aka the re-branded for marketing purposes war) industry revealed the rank stupidity within the term ‘hard work’.
Those telling others to work hard and get ahead (I already had one couldn’t they see it?) were truly hard work.
This is why I’ve always personally advocated a mandatory 2 years of military service right out of high school (or the equivalent). Probably never happen but I always like to picture this “snowflake” generation standing in front of their bunks in a drafty barracks at 4:00 AM while a drill sergeant yells in their respective faces at a distance of 6 inches.
Unfortunately, it was my generation (the last of the so-called “baby boomers”), which I refer to as the “Time Out” generation, that was responsible for this current mess of “safe place” idiots. We, not myself mind you, were the first of young parents who came up with the idea of “time out” for kids who were acting up rather than whopping their little butts. Just a variation of “standing in the corner” after you whopped their little butts. Now our children have grown up, had their own children, and carried on and expanded the theory of “time out” to such a degree that the majority of current generation of 17 to 24 year olds have been reduced to isolated, oversensitive, reactive little wossnames whose only intimate relationships they ever have are with their smart phones.
There are exceptions of course but they seem to be few and far between.
Not that I’m generalizing of anything.