Thread: A Telling Story of Youth Today

So I sit out on the porch hands aching, tired as hell, popping Asprin pondering life in these United States..

About 3 Weeks ago I did a rather large project, tearing out the front flower beds and building a retaining wall backfilled with Lavarock. Took a solid week, and wore me out, but hey the front of the house looks much neater and cleaner...

So of course a couple of days after I finish the 15 YO kid who's family is renting from my closest neighbor wanders up here to ask if by chance I was looking for somebody to do some work.. I tell him he was a day late but I would see what comes up..

A few days ago I get a new 10' pole saw and start limbing the trees up, which is honestly quite a bit of fun, right up until you have to load all of them onto the Tractor forks to go dump them I think to myself, well hell, kid looking for work and I have the boat getting ready to go back in the water this weekend it will need waxing before that happens. I ain't getting any younger, I could use a hand, the wife agrees, so I stop by to talk to him and his Mom.. We agree after school today he can come down and work for a bit, I will pay him $10 per hour cash.. At this point in time I am feeling pretty happy..

So this morning I go cut more limbs off the trees, and do just the maintenance on the boat, leaving the downed limbs for us to stack, and the boat for both of us to wax...

So comes 3:30 No kid, so I start busting out the boat, because the wife is very adamant about getting it in the water over the long weekend, she saved her pennies to get us a covered slip down at the Marina, so we can go out anytime we want without having to do the whole launch and recover thing

So I think back to when I was hustling lawn cutting jobs and shoveling snow for money at his age, and I can't remember ever not showing up, in fact I think Mom would have had a bit of a problem if I had left a neighbor hanging..

Needless to say I have finished most of the Boat except where you actually have to crawl underneath to wax the hull, and I left the tree limbs for later to stack and dump
I don't get it, the money is better then most places up here pay for real, and what kid wouldn't want to mess around with a Boat and a Tractor, that would have been way to much fun to pass up when I was that age

Any just some rambling thought from the front porch as I watch the Hummingbirds at the feeder right above my head

It is a SAD world we live in now a days!
I KNOW my Father would have kicked my BUTT if I said I was going to help a neighbor and didn't show...
Seems it is few and far between that have the drive to actually work for something instead of just EXPECTING it.

I tell my students they can't show up to their jobs late, they can't be on their cell phones at work, they can't pick and choose what tasks to do, etc etc. They just nod and continue doing whatever they feel like doing.

I hate to say it, but I look forward to the first time each is not called back, or laid off, or whatever just so they can finally get it through their heads.

Well, really I don't. I hope they see it happen to someone else and remember back when I taught them better...

well aren't kids of this generation just entitled to things and don't have to work for anything? at least that seems to be what alot of them think these days. Even some of the younger "adults" I work with have the same thought process and terrible work ethics, I don't know where it comes from, I was always taught, when I was growing up, that you have to work for what you get

It has been going on for several generations, each worse than the last. They grew up in good times, maybe were spoiled and now they will walk into tough times. Good luck to em.

Bob

When I speak w/ parents that see these things in their kids, I tell them its self-correcting. Hunger games are a very efficient tutor. And many of them get it right away and live & act differently because of it. The sadness is the years that could have benefited from the link & trust of a loving parent can't be bought back. As Mark Twain said. (very rough, from memory) when I was a young man, my father was a fool. When we got together about 10 yrs later, I was amazed at what he had learned.

Maybe something happened that was out of his control & you were the last thing on his mind.
He will be back soon.
Give him a chance to explain the first one; then you will have a good idea of what kind of kid he is.

Originally Posted by holli4pirating

I tell my students they can't show up to their jobs late, they can't be on their cell phones at work, they can't pick and choose what tasks to do, etc etc. They just nod and continue doing whatever they feel like doing.

I hate to say it, but I look forward to the first time each is not called back, or laid off, or whatever just so they can finally get it through their heads.

Well, really I don't. I hope they see it happen to someone else and remember back when I taught them better...

I am pretty confident that people with that attitude will convince themselves that it is not their fault, and that someone else is to blame.

I am only in my mid thirties but still have a youth of today attitude. I am driven crazy by people's attitude to work, mostly the younger guys, but a good number of the older guys too, I think working FIFO gives you a false idea of what a hard days work is.

I have to disagree with the assessment that the world is getting better despite the grumblings of old men. Financially, perhaps it is true. Perhaps. More young millionaires doesn't mean there ain't more destitute young people, working-poor, single mothers, drug problems, housing crises, crime, prisoners in jail (probably one of the few growth industries in the western world - jail building). Western society is rotting from the inside out, but hey, as long as we all stay plugged into our iClones we can drown out the death rattle.

Changing the measure is like sweeping dirt under a carpet. GDP doesn't measure the health of a society. But it seems it's all we care about nowadays.

James.

Originally Posted by Jimbo

I have to disagree with the assessment that the world is getting better despite the grumblings of old men. Financially, perhaps it is true. Perhaps. More young millionaires doesn't mean there ain't more destitute young people, working-poor, single mothers, drug problems, housing crises, crime, prisoners in jail (probably one of the few growth industries in the western world - jail building). Western society is rotting from the inside out, but hey, as long as we all stay plugged into our iClones we can drown out the death rattle.

Changing the measure is like sweeping dirt under a carpet. GDP doesn't measure the health of a society. But it seems it's all we care about nowadays.

Well, that's why it's important to use proper measures in the proper context. Are working-poor, housing crises, and crime worse or better than they used to be? And the timeframe to evaluate those is generations (the topic of this thread) not few years. I am pretty sure that single mothers is one thing on the rise, but I don't see how single-motherhood by itself is a problem - unpacking the problems that are typically associated with it is the proper way to quantify improvement/decline. For example domestic abuse - is increase in single-motherhood related to increase or decline in domestic abuse? It is quite possible that when the society used to stigmatize and place huge barriers to single-motherhood the domestic abuse was much higher.

As far as increasing prison population, is that due to increased crime, or due to harsher punishments for crimes that didn't used to be punished. The two are very different societal issues, and you may argue that both show decline in the society, but it's a very different form of decline.

We could look at things like life expectancy, deaths due to various illness, hunger, social disparity, but again on most of those measures over generations there has been huge progress. I am sure that on some measures there is decline, but quantification should come first and then whether we can decide if overall the positives outweigh the benefits. Without quantification, we tend to fall victims of the ways our brain distorts the past, which are very well established.

If we're talking morals when I look on generational time scale, I see that few hundred years ago people were killed for what they were thinking. Then that stopped, and I would say it was a good thing. Then people stopped being killed for the color of their skin, also a good thing in my book. Then people stopped being killed for just being unfortunate to be born poor and having to work in toxic environment (basically choosing a slower death to a fast one) - this hasn't stopped completely but it is vastly reduced. Women were allowed to participate in the political process and have a say what the society looks like. Then people stopped being discriminated based on the color of their skin.

Nowadays the society is more democratic than it ever was. May be the social mobility has decreased over the last years, but over the last generations it has increased. May be as a result, the more elitist pursuits (say art, science, technology, politics) have lost ground at least in visibility to the more populist ones (say sports, entertainment), but it's hard to argue that playing the latest videogame is more valuable than going to the latest opera production.


Now, get outta my lawn, leave the 6-pack and that brown bag with the moonshine!