Fawndoo at The Boiled Egg of Infinity is throwing an Old Coot Blog Party, and being an old coot, this is right up my alley.

The topic: What’s changed since you were young? Which changes have been good? Which have been bad? What do you regret, and what do you predict?

Of course, the topic invites some serious discussion… but I do enough serious railing against change at this blog on a normal day. For today’s topic, I’ll just briefly rant about the differences between my childhood and the childhood our children are enjoying.

When I was a kid, we spent the summertime outdoors. Barefooted. We played with our dogs and caught bugs and frogs and the occasional garter snake. We swam and ran and played ball and had to be tracked down by our parents when it was time to come in. We’d eat a quick dinner, get the day’s filth scrubbed off of us, and then sleep real hard for eight hours so we could get back up the next morning and do it all again.

Today, it’s just not safe to let your kids have the run of the neighborhood. Our kids play outside in our fenced in yard in our relatively quiet, peaceful neighborhood… and still Wendy and I feel like we have to be outside with them at all times for fear some serial killer will grab ‘em.

And, truth be told, our kids only go outside when they are forced to. To get our kids off the couch and away from the Xbox and the Gamecube, we usually have to resort to begging, blackmailing, bribing and threatening.

And, that’s another thing. When I was a kid, video games looked like this:

That’s Pitfall for the Atari 2600. Remember Pitfall? Remember how, at the time, the graphics were AMAZING?

These days, video games look like this:

That’s Super Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube. The kids love it. And, who wouldn’t? Look at those graphics! It’s like playing a Saturday morning cartoon!

Oh, yeah… that’s another thing. When I was a kid, we watched our cartoons on Saturday morning, and we were glad to have them. These kids today have sixty gazillion cartoon networks that all show cartoons 24/7. Kids don’t have to wait to watch cartoons once a week now a days.

We didn't have all those options, all those different channels, when I was a kid. In fact, until I was in 9th grade, we only had FOUR CHANNELS! We had the local ABC, NBC, and CBS... and we had Sesame Street on PBS. That was it! And we were glad to have those channels!

By the way, when I was a kid, our cartoons made sense. Remember these shows?

Our kids watch shows like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragonball Z. I haven’t got the slightest idea what is going on in those shows. I can’t tell the goodguys from the badguys. I’m totally lost. The kids, however, claim that they know what’s going on. Pokemon is the worst. There must be about a thousand of the little animals known as Pokemons (Pokemen? Pokemoni? Beats me.) Each creature has a type and a form and an evolved form and yadda, yadda, yadda. Why should watching a cartoon involve as much study and memorization as school work?

And speaking of school work, don’t even get me started. When I was a kid, we studied reading and writing and arithmetic. The kids still study some form of those subjects, I suppose… but everything these days is done on a computer. That’s fine, computers are basic and fundamental these days… but shouldn’t a kid be able to do some stuff in his or her head?

Oh, and computers. Holy moly. Talk about changes, I guess the biggest change of all from the days when I was a kid is the internet. You know what they say, every possible good and every possible bad is out there. Just for a recent example… when I was searching for clips from the classic cartoons above at Google Images, I was able to quickly find them. However, along with the images above, I also saw pornographic cartoon images involving the characters from The Jetsons and The Flintstones. Why? Why does that even have to happen? Who enjoys those kinds of images? On second thought, I really don’t want to know.

Wendy and I have a “blended” family… two kids from her first marriage and one kid from mine. When I was a child, people just didn’t get divorced. These days, it seems like everyone has been divorced at least once. That rise in the divorce rate can’t be good. Then again, I grew up with two parents who hated each other and went for years at a time without talking, and that’s certainly worse than divorce. I guess that divorce in general is, of course, a bad thing…. But there are things that are worse.

When I was a kid, black people were black people, white people were white people, Indians were Indians, Chinese people were Chinese people, etc. These days, you never know which label is preferred by any given group. And, politically correct whites make it all that much worse by constantly changing what they tell each other is the preferred label or class or race term, or what have you. Here’s why that topic is on my mind: A few weeks ago, we were visiting our friends, the Morris family. My buddy Jamie and I were watching a band perform on television, and my eight year old son was watching them with us. Either Jamie or I, I can’t remember which, made a comment about how talented one of the musicians was. My son asked me which musician on the stage we were talking about. I told him “That one guy; the black guy on the left.” My son frowned at me and said “African American, Dad. Don’t say ‘black.’” I asked him if “African American” was the term they were teaching him in school this month, and he said that it was. I told him to keep saying the term they were teaching him, but explained to him that I hadn’t meant anything racist or derogatory by using the word “black.”

Geez! Lectured about political correctness by my eight year old son! It seems like six months ago I was wiping the boy’s butt for him, and now he’s frowning on my extreme lack of racial sensitivity.

I could go on and on, but I think I’ve run out of steam. Besides, you young whipper snappers out there probably don’t want to read any more of my ranting, anyway.

And that’s another thing: When I was a kid, people listened respectfully when their elders were ranting!

Permalink -- Posted by Darrell at 09:23