Comments

The perfect circle — 11 Comments

  1. 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.

  2. 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!)

  3. 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…

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

Hosted by Curratech Blog Hosting