Posted on 02/26/2014 4:15:32 AM PST by Kaslin
America's most popular cable news host is upset. "Marijuana use, video games and texting (are) creating major social problems," says Bill O'Reilly. "This is an epidemic that will lead to a weaker nation!"
Give me a break.
Crotchety old geezers always complain about "the kids." The Boston Globe frets about "Idle Trophy Kids." The New York Post asks if millennials are "The Worst Generation?" Older folks (my age) complain that young people spend so much time texting each other that they can't communicate. And because they spend hours playing violent video games, violence is up.
Bunk.
It's true that kids today play incredibly violent games like "Halo" and "Grand Theft Auto," but as the games' popularity increased (over the past 20 years), youth violence dropped 55 percent. In Japan, kids spend more time playing violent games, and there's even less violence. And in America, despite media hype, there are fewer school shootings now, not more.
Kids "can't communicate" because they text all the time? Recently, kids invented Facebook, YouTube, Firefox, Groupon, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest and so on. They communicate something .
Inevitably, we older people misunderstand new ways young people do things -- we are frightened by the risks and oblivious to the benefits.
If O'Reilly had been on TV in the '50s, he would have ranted about comic books causing juvenile delinquency. The Senate actually held hearings in which the public was instructed that Superman "embodied sadistic fantasies ... injurious to children ... "
Today O'Reilly opines, "The cyberspace addiction rate among American children is off the charts ... they don't learn coping skills! ... In China, young people are encouraged to compete, be disciplined, live in the real world. Not here."
Even if that were true, what have Chinese young people invented lately? Any companies? What music and art did they compose?
O'Reilly worries about "America going to pot ... If you use any intoxicating agent, your goal is to leave reality. You're not satisfied with your current state of mind, you want to get high, buzzed, blasted, whatever."
I say, so what?
Some people like the sensation of getting "buzzed." Some are not satisfied with their current state of mind. Good. That's what gets people to learn new things.
Altering our minds is a most basic right. We alter our minds -- often for the better -- every time we read a book, fall in love or watch a TV show, including O'Reilly's.
But old people worry that young people are exposed to sexual imagery. It's true the Web brings pornography to children's computers, and that culture is often coarse. When Miley twerks, I cringe.
But again, where's the harm? As reporter Michael Moynihan will point out on my TV show this week, "Over the past 20 or so years, sex has been in everyone's face, yet teen pregnancy dropped by 50 percent."
I wish outraged oldsters remembered how we once laughed at those who were frightened by Elvis Presley.
In 1956, The New York Times said Elvis had "no discernable singing ability." The New York Daily News called his act "animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos." Even Frank Sinatra said his kind of music is "deplorable, a rancid, smelling aphrodisiac (that) fosters destructive relations in young people."
Somehow, America survived Elvis.
"Moral panics are one of our favorite things," says Moynihan. "If there's nothing to be panicked about, what do you write about?" Being outraged is part of the media circus.
The danger is that the outrage undermines perspective. It creates a false impression of how risky the present is, and it fuels unnecessary, freedom-killing regulations.
Old people always talk about the good old days. But the good old days were not so good. When I was young, more kids were intolerant, racist, sexist and homophobic. They had little knowledge of life beyond their neighborhoods. Today, thanks to the Web and other innovations, life is better, not worse.
My observation is that it isn’t so much that kids today are doing stupid/weird/dangerous/wild/irresponsible things. That’s always been the case and likely always will. And I suspect it’s not altogether harmful, at least for those who survive - you learn a lot from your own stupidity if it doesn’t kill you.
IMHO, it’s that, in previous generations, kids got over it and grew up. It seems now, it’s perfectly acceptable to act like a teenager well into one’s 30s and often later.
I always kinda wished that the Codgers hadn’t have left Brooklyn.
While training to go to Iraq a few years ago, I had a discussion with a crusty SFC who had just returned from there about the younger generation. He was in his late 30’s early 40’s I was pushing 50. In our generation there was generally some trepidation about pulling the trigger for the first time against another human, he said kids today have no such concerns as they have done it tens of thousands of times via gaming. I left there feeling pretty good about the next generation as represented by those in the military, the did amazing things routinely. There are concerns about how this translates to society in general.
Those are not values on which to build a meaningful life, much less a functioning society and government championing genuine liberty and freedom. It is the soil in which tyranny flourishes and genuine personal liberty and freedom dies as the lusts of the eye, the lusts of the flesh, and the pride of life take over and rule.
Personally I think “IDIOCRACY” is a documentary.
What a pathetic perspective.
It didn’t do it to me but then I started late, I was in my twenties before I had access to pot or even very much junk food. Looking back at some of the conversation that I am still able to remember it is a wonder that most of us actually did manage to make a living somehow.
Actually I think Stossel is missing some clues. The percentage of those in their twenties, thirties and even forties who are acting like children now would have been unthinkable fifty years ago. I often tell people how, at 23 years, I had an honorable discharge from the Navy, a Navy electronics certificate, a job earning what would amount to at least 65 thousand a year now in inflation adjusted terms and a new car which I bought with my earnings and was considered a failure because I did not already have a wife and at least one child. Compare that to now. I actually remember feeling bad about myself back then, thinking I was a real slacker. Of course, in those days, the school buses in this state were driven by high school juniors and seniors and they did a very fine job of it. I would have been a driver myself had I not made a single mistake on the driving test while crossing a railroad track. No errors were allowed on the driving test and no retests were given. Think about that compared to today’s teenagers.
One other thing, today’s young people are not, for the most part, capable of carrying on a real conversation, regardless of what Stossel may think. There are exceptions as there are always exceptions but the rule stands. All anyone need do is watch some old movies from the forties to realize that something is vastly different in what passes for communication now.
You are beyond the valley of the super fatuous
Socrates
That punk kid Plato and his Playstation and his dang Grand Theft Auto...nothing good will come of it, mark my words. And don't ever start me on that Alexander kid. He talks like he's going to conquer the world.
We see the inability to communicate quite frequently in new hires. Put a guy on an ambulance who cannot communicate quickly and efficiently and you end up with dead people.
“So you liked the racism and sexism of the ‘50s?”
I don’t know where (of IF) you lived during those years, but there was no such thing as either in the world I inhabited—about 25 miles farther out on Long Island than BOR. We didn’t even know the terms.
More to the point, however, is that those two particular objections to 50’s society should top your list. I wasn’t over-fond of A-bomb drills, commies throughout the U. S. government, my uncles being sent to Korea (so soon after they returned from Japan & Germany), the firing of MacArthur, party-lines, any year the Yanks lost the series, and cigarette smoke everywhere but church. But even with those and other imperfections, there’s no comparison between the cultures of the 50s and today’s. Racism, sexism? C’mon, were you actually a kid back then?
amen!
The Artful Codgers?
I thought this thread was about BADGERS!!!
Seeing as how I have reached the “Codger AND Curmudgeon, AND Sarcastic AND Sardonic” level, have to pass along the following..
“old” guy was looking at his cell phone, trying to answer it when some young kid came buy and said “Need some help POPS?” and ended up saying such things as “You people are something and always running us young guys down but you can’t work a VCR, have trouble with your TV remote, can’t program your phone and definitely know nothing about a computer”.
The ‘old guy’ looked him up and down and replied
“Your are right son. WE grew up without cell phones, TV’s, VCR’s and computers, were neanderthals and went off to war when and where it was called, for the most part all served honorably, some made it a career, others got out, looked around, got off our asses and INVENTED ALL THAT STUFF you are talking about.”
“Now Sonny, just what have you accomplished recently”?
BTTT
The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested ... - Amazon.com www.amazon.com/The-Death-Grown-Up.../0312340494 Amazon.com The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization [Diana West] on Amazon.com. *FREE* ... We are seeing in our own nation the results of this refusal to assume adult responsibilities.
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