The curmudgeon files

If I had a lawn and there were kids around the neighborhood, boy, I'd sure know what to say.




"You kids play on my lawn all you want. Don't let your dogs poop on it. If they do, pick it up. Don't leave divots, and don't throw anything through a window. Have fun."

The trouble is, kids don't seem to play outside anymore, unless it's during an organized play date in a yard with an 8' security fence and an adult on watch at all times. When I was a boy, besides having to walk 6 miles to school in the snow, I'd play outside with by amigos. Summers especially. No school, out the door by nine, back home at dusk. Did my mom worry herself sick if she lost sight of me for longer than thirty-two seconds? Not a chance.

Sound like a curmudgeon, don't I? Do we sour on youth as we grow older? Are our own experiences so ingrained, so ossified, that we cannot imagine how the evolution of social life away from our halcyon days could have happened? Part of it is, I think, that for many of us our childhood, dimly and selectively remembered, becomes a gold standard by which we measure the childhood of kids today. And we find their experiences wanting because they enjoy and revel in almost none of the things and activities we held dear.

Of course, we had none of the shiny electronic enticements kids have today. And I'll admit, I'm attracted to a handful of electronic devices myself. On top of that, one enticement above all infects how we view kids and their world. That is TV and it's not that kids watch too much of it or get the wrong ideas from the offered fare. No, it's us, the parents and grandparents who refuse to sprinkle grains of salt on the news we see and hear on TV. It just might be (I don't know for sure, haven't done the statistical research) that per capita no more bad things happen to kids today than happened when I was a lad. We just hear about more of them now. Back in the day, Huntley and Brinkley, Cronkite, and whoever the doofus on ABC was, had a tough enough time covering the world news in half an hour. A lot was happening, local news for them was off the radar. Our parents worried about nuclear war and commies at the gate. We watched Romper Room and wondered how the hell we could be a Do Bee.

These days, cable channels have to fill 24 hours with stuff. CNN, Nancy Grace, and all the other cable crumbs that serve miniature demographics have to put something on the air or die. So the stories that were under-reported or not reported at all back when network TV ruled the waves are now headline news in some venues ... for weeks. 

Which brings me to the tragedy in Charleston. How's that for a non-sequitur? I think it would be interesting to study a developmental map of this Roof guy's life from birth to today. To determine where the plot points were in his life. How did he come to take path B rather than path A? What influences led him to be a 21-year old who felt it necessary to gun down nine people? The same goes for the Aurora shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter, Columbine, on and on, tragically. I'd like to follow the thread back to the beginning. Of course, mental illness could and probably is a factor in all of these cases. And that is a whole 'nother tragedy.