Stolen from the mind of Dr Zodiac, Dave Nesbit's twisted and more honest alter ego.
So occasionally people ask me “What is wrong with kids these days.” First off I have no idea why I get asked this, I'm 43 years old and left physical kid hood a while back. (I think the last stages of it ended somewhere two blocks from the Berlin wall. If you see it, tell it I said hi.) Second and as a matter of clarifying the point, by kids the people asking me usually mean people from their teens to their early twenties. I hate to be ageist here but the adolescent and post adolescent phase seems to be blurring together a lot more these days.
So let me see. I had the joy of growing up in the 1980's and by joy I mean I grew up during an era where it began to dawn on a number of people that we might be well and truly boned as a species. Acid rain was making headlines then. Not that the rain was totally acid but enough to say ruin a paint job for a guy in Ontario, or poison a lake in Manitoba. Nothing too serious.
Next we began hearing a strange piece of news. Apparently sex could kill you. Now this was a shocker for me personally, I hadn't really been having a lot of sex at the time, but the idea had an appeal and my relationship with my right hand was getting a little stale. I could have cheated on it with my left, but I'm strangely ambidextrous. I write with my left hand and throw with my right, and whatever hand I do something with I do it pretty much exclusively.
When you're a teen your body is passing along an imperative. “Have sex now!” I can only speak for guys but I'm sure I'm not the only one who thought a knothole in the fence was winking at them. Just sayin.
And now sex can kill, and quite horribly at that. A slow lingering death that begins with sucks, proceeds to sucks worse, and ends with sucks horribly and with no dignity at all for you.
I think that's when I first heard the call of intense nihilism. Nature is becoming poisoned, your most basic and most entertaining biological processes can now kill you and Ronald Reagan is President and every day some uptight jag off is doing there best to make all the things you like culturally non existent.
It was enough to make the option of carnage and violence for it's own sake seem pretty appealing. I never gave into that voice totally but I engaged in a fair amount of mischief and enough destruction of property to help me feel like I somehow had gotten my own back.
Now let's fast forward to the “oughts” shall we?
Sex can still kill you, our environment is getting even more poisonous and messed up yet somehow it's become less of an issue, grand larceny on a scale unimagined by emperors is less a crime then the national sport, and reality TV has convinced an entire generation that they deserve to be famous for nothing more than being.. Fuck I don't know, a kid with an attitude and a cool name? It's a social sort of training that makes everyone think the camera is rolling twenty four seven and makes every moment or confrontation into a moment of artificial drama.
Every day we as a society seem to reward the worst of what we can be rather than the best of what we can be. To be a celebrity way back when you had to do something worth celebrating. Beat the Nazi's or fly into space with no real idea whether or not the rocket you are strapped to might explode and turn you into a charcoal briquette, or create a vaccine that wipes a disease off the map. (Jonas Salk you the man!)
It's a strange thought for me to have some much as a millimeter of overlap with some of the talking heads on Fox news, or the somewhat more twisted and scarily honest televangelists out there, but we need to get our values in line.
I know a ton of amazing kids who have their eyes on the prize, working to create fixes for our more serious problems. Now we just need to get all the idiots surrounding them to Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
I swear someone could announce a cure for cancer and be told to wait a minute because Lady Gaga is going to show her new look.
We as a society have our culture far more invested in spectacle than in anything that might have any actual meaning. In fact our culture by and large seems to be on a search and destroy mission for substance and meaning. It should be kind of a tip off of our need for it that John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are viewed as the people in the news and in the mass media people trust most.
Spectacle is the art of making people go ohh and ahh at something that means nothing. An explosion of a firework is pretty but the Mona Lisa lasts longer. The people who run the machinery of popular culture are terrified of actual content for reasons too sordid for me to go into here. Just let it be said that if you teach people to just enjoy the surface and not look past it. It makes it much easier to sell a product or idea that way.
Lets perhaps teach ourselves to have a longer attention span. Care less about the superficial and artificial bullshit we are sold daily as news and culture, and maybe make something worth passing onto the next group of kids out there.
The fault is every bit as much ours as theirs. “Whats wrong with the kids today?” In a word? Us. We look at the wrong ones, and make their names far too well known. Turn the channel on your cable box from “Jersey Shore” to Neil Degrasse Tyson. Or turn the damn thing off all together and pat the kid who is learning a thing or two about science, art or any constructive thing on the head and tell them they're the new star.
