The problem with young people today is that they’re too damned soft.
In my day, young people were tough, damn it. We were gristly, sinewy and hard as nails. My generation was forged in a furnace of fiery parents, sweltering outhouses, creamed chip beef and the type of childhood diseases that either killed you or put some damned hair on your chest.
We had to be hard – conditions demanded it. There was no room for mollycoddling and teenaged slackassery. We couldn’t lie around in our underpants all day levelling up in Donkey Kong and text messaging our idiot friends. We were too busy rendering sheep fat, toting ice blocks and extracting our own teeth for that kind of foolishness. Our “down time” was getting dressed up in flour sack suits and attending the funerals of siblings who had died of dust pneumonia.
But these young people today? They’re marshmallows. And the similarity extends beyond their squishy plumpness and incredible lack of taste. Most have never done a lick of honest work and wouldn’t recognized a calloused palm if you clapped them across the ear with one.
They don’t understand what it means to sacrifice or to go without. For them, sacrifice is eating an unfrosted pop tart, fornicating with an unflavored condom or settling for less than an unlimited phone plan. Take away their cushy duvets, parental fawning and Junior Shopper credit cards and they wouldn’t last 5 damned minutes in the cold hard world.
And they’re emotionally soft too. Call a young person a worthless ninnyhammer and he’ll whinge, cry and fold up like a house of cards just to prove you right. Criticism’s considered some form of abuse instead of what it’s supposed to be – a practical assessment of your obvious limitations and some damned motivation to prove me wrong.
Face facts, this country is deep in the toilet and one flush away from becoming “Runningdoghai” the 23rd Province of the People’s Republic of China. If we ever want to return our nation to its former glory we need to stop raising a generation of spongy cry-babies and get back to work on hardening our resolve, our bodies and our minds.
They’re too damned soft. That’s the problem with young people today.
