Day #25 - Youth

Man.  I'm lovin' it.  I'm just a single day away from the end of the alphabet.  I have to say, it's been a pretty crazy time, trying to come up with a subject for every single letter of the alphabet.  It's harder than you think!!  But here we are.

Day 25 is about Youth.  Our Youth.  Young'n's.  Youngsters.  Young People.  There, that ate up about 12 words of the subject.  There, is that good enough?  Are we done?

Yeah right.  Sorry America, I'm afraid I could write entire encyclopedias here.  Let me at least eek out a couple volumes before I go to bed, OK?  Deal?  So let's get going.

Let's get right to some meat.  Then I'll move on to the 'taters.  No, no, the 'Taters.  Not the Toddlers. What's the meat, you ask?  That should be obvious.  How we're allowed (or not allowed) to raise our children.  This is probably the most disturbing that's happened to us in the course of my lifetime.

Now, I'm just sure that people everywhere are simply gasping at the audacity of what not only comes out of kids' mouths these days, but also at the sheer size of their "cahones" when it comes to the things they do. And us eld people just shake our heads, and can be heard saying things like "Wow...I can't believe he just SAID THAT"...as well as "Can you believe that?  Why, if I had done that to MY father..." usually quickly followed by a rather graphic description of father and son in some torture session, usually involving a wood shed and a paddle with nails in it...that sort of thing.  Yes, America, things have indeed changed some, haven't they?  Used to be, kids sassed us, it wasn't that uncommon to see mom stretch her arm, usually over a greater distance than believed possible, and just POP that kid in the mouth.  Sure, we may have winced slightly, but it was acceptable back then.  Sometimes it just took just that to keep that kid in line, and you could sure believe that the next time sassing came to mind, he'd remember that pop, and zip it up.  And mom was the preferred parent for punishment.  What was it mom was always saying?  Oh yeah..."You just WAIT till your FATHER gets home!!"  We knew we'd had it then, for sure.  Visions of dad's belt coming off his waist was the biggest nightmare around for most bad kids.

No more of that crap though.  Nooooo.....now, we're in danger of losing our children with that kind of behavior by parents.  The state is the all-powerful god in this day and age.  The department of Child Protective Services is the enemies of parents now.  Phrases like "What's best for the children" became household words no parent wants to hear.  And worse yet, not only are parents fearful of them, they fear their own children!!  One smack too hard, armed with another child's story of someone else's parents that got hauled off, or that had their children taken away for whatever reason...and your child is now someone you no longer know.  Next thing you know, DHS is speeding up to your curb, and those little innocents that were so cute 10 years ago, and that you loved and cherished are now evil pre-teens, who, after being told they couldn't go to the Justin Beiber concert without first finishing their homework, have decided they've had enough and turned on you.  After a couple years of foster care with a new family that spoils them to no end, they can file to be emancipated.  12 year old girls, who, after watching their barely older sisters having kids before their time, dressing up to emulate them, then getting picked up as they bounce down the sidewalk and raped, mostly because they look like they're more 19 instead of 13.  What can we do about it?  Not a damn thing. Can't spank 'em, you could go to jail.  Can't yell at them too much, we might damage their mentality.  No, we can't touch the little demons, for fear they'll take us to court and divorce us.

If you happen to find your way to YouTube, look for a video by The Whitest Kids You Know (WKUK) entitled "Get a New Daddy".  It's pretty funny the first time around, but about the time you decide to show it to the wife to make her laugh, you start thinking about it...and then you get a little peeved that someone has put something like this out there where kids might see it, or that they even had kids in the video to begin with.  The thing that really ends up making you the maddest, however, is how absolutely true it really is.  Anytime one of your kids wants to replace a parent that's making his/her life difficult, just set 'em up, either call the police or DHS, and wait for the fun to begin.  It's sure easy enough to make those things stick, trust me.  Check out the video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNR-x1net-A

if you don't feel like searching today.  The thing I REALLY love is that there's been 800,000 views to this, and there isn't one....single...bad...comment about it.  Mostly just comments about how cool it is, or questions like "Who's kids are those, I wonder?"....REALLY????  That's IT??  That's all you have to say America, for real?

I'm sorry kids, but I think it's about time we took punishment back into our homes, away from the prying eyes of the government, before this gets out of hand (like it hasn't already).  It is, of course, only going to get worse, the more people forget what it used to be like, and all the older people that used to get spanked die off with that secret.  By then, of course, children will be so out of control that we won't have any idea what to do about it, and won't be able to do anything about it if we did think of something to do.

We used to have great alternatives to punishment.  The YMCA/YWCA.  Military School.  Cub/Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts.  Youth Camp, Youth Groups, Bible Camp.  Oh sure, we still have those options...but getting your kids to attend these geeky functions is next to impossible without tricking them.

Now the 'taters.  Personally?  I love 'taters.  Don't you?  This one, more or less, goes hand in hand with the meat.

Our kids are becoming drug addicts.  Worse yet, we're their best teachers.  No, I don't mean potheads.  I'm not talking about meth, or coke either.  I'm talking about, yeah, you guessed it:  our mini-medicine cabinets.  Every little quirk in our kids' personalities, has, nowadays, a different medicine to go along with it.  We, as parents, see something that's not mom or dad, or if their mouths or actions get slightly out of tune, and we're dragging them off to see their psychiatrists; where for $100 a visit, they'll flip off a prescription for about anything a kid can come up with.  WELL??  It's not like we can punish 'em, so what other option are we left with?  Get them before they get you.  That's all we got left!  Please, if you know what's good for you and your kids, check out Day #13 - Mental Heath, and Day #16, Pharmaceutical companies.  Maybe those'll knock some sense into you.

This one, hand in hand with Days 13 and 16, ranks collectively as our biggest sin America.  What are our kids going to turn out as once we die off?  What future do they have as pill-poppers?  What kind of defense are we going to have in our future with a bunch of druggies on our front lines?

And the door creaks shut on Day #25.  :D