This just in, courtesy of my chess buddies on my Playground Player Chessgames.com site:
It has become necessary to plead with teenagers not to eat Tide detergent pods (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/01/11/tide-pod-challenge-teens-eating-detergent-pods-and-posting-videos-online/1023583001/).
First there was a problem with toddlers putting these things in their mouths, probably because they look like candy, with sometimes fatal, and always serious, results. But then it took off as a youtube fad among teenagers: “the Tide Challenge.” Uh, you can get sick and die from this…
So just how stupid have we become? Meanwhile, we are lumbered with the biggest and costliest “education” system ever known in history, and those who pass through it seem to be getting dumber and dumber and dumber.
I wonder if it was something like this that happened to the Indus Valley civilization.
Good Lord! How stupid are these people? One guy saying he had no regrets as they are carrying him away. 75 years ago, people were saying they had no regrets when they undertook extraordinary risks to save a fellow soldier in WW II, now kids that age are saying they have no regrets when they poison themselves with detergent.
If the Lord does not return very soon, I fear for the human race.
Maybe this is what happened to the Thracians.
When everything that was once considered immoral and/or dangerous has been mainstreamed, one has to prove oneself by going beyond the dangerous to the definitively lethal. It’s all part of the culture of death. Hell, after all, is the realm of despair.
I’ve suddenly remembered a passage from Edwin Arlington Robinson’s book-length poem, “Amaranth”: “We make a tinkling jest of the wrong road that brought us here, but when we are alone we put the bells away.”
One of my favorite poets–“The Town Down the River”
It’s so bad, even Hillary Clinton has gotten in on it. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTsh5T9VwAAusDr.jpg
That might be dangerous to the detergent. 🙂
Was *that* what was wrong with her during the campaign? I thought it was the booze.
You can’t blame it on her detergent diet, she can’t help it that she can’t resist detergent. 🙂
Do you suppose she might be like the Pharisees and whitewashed tombs – clean on the outside, but oh that inside!?
That applies to a lot of people in this day. The revelations of the last few months have ben eye opening.
Methinks a little less formal education and a little more down-home country common sense would do the trick.
I think you are right. Let a few of these youngsters change a tire beside the road during a heavy rainstorm or dig out from under 3′ of snow and tell me how you feel.
Yep, and feeding the chickens, milking the cows, bringing dinner in from the garden – and oh the joy of a tire swing!
One of the biggest problems is that in our post agricultural world, kids don’t have much to do growing up. Kids raised on farms were part of the bread chain from an early age and had value within the family. Nowadays, not so much.
It’s a very sad thing that big agri has pushed the family farm to near extinction. Spending summers on my uncle’s farm was one of the best things about my childhood. (and we did have a tire swing 🙂 )
I agree. It’s become as cutthroat as any business out there. I did a little work on a dairy farm, as a teen, and it was great.
What I’ve heard from farmers, in person (remember, I was a reporter, once upon a time), is that their children don’t want to continue the family farm. That leaves them pretty much forced to sell out for as much money as they can get: and then the developer paves the whole thing over and puts up condos.
When I was a boy, we had a farm in the neighborhood whose family had fought in the Revolutionary War; and their farm went back some years before that. In the summer I’d hop on my bike, pedal for ten minutes, and buy corn on the cob picked that same morning.
But it’s gone, of course. The graves of the men of that family can still be seen in the Revolutionary War cemetery, but no trace of the farm remains. The We Love the Environment Sustainable Green Democrat Party wiped it out of existence.
I’d say it’s our culture more than “big agri” that has caused the near-extinction of the family farm. The kids grow up wanting bright lights, adventure, big money, excitement, blah-blah-blah. So there’s no one to continue.
Even in Amish country, the young folks are leaving the farm life behind. I’d venture to say that a lot of today’s youth have no idea of how farming works or how it affects their life.
I’ve known farmers whose family farmed the same land for 200 years, and couldn’t get any of their kids to stay.
Okay, let me put in a word for city living — as it was in the old days. I spent the first 11 years of my life in the South Bronx, maybe a slum, but even slums were different in those days. There may have been gangs, but they fought each other and left the rest of us alone. And we were safe — because everyone minded everyone else’s business. Kids played on the streets (without play dates) and even went to the store by themselves when they were old enough. No one locked a door during the day; neighbors just came and went, announcing their arrival by yelling “heloooo” as they entered a friend’s apartment.
But kids weren’t idle. We went to school all day, and we had homework to do when we came home — real homework, not indoctrination exercises. We also helped with chores around the house. And we were expected to be polite to our elders, honest about our activities, diligent in our work, and responsible with what little money there was. It was made plain to us that nothing was coming to us; we earned whatever we got, either by doing chores or just doing well in school. We also earned swats on the behind for NOT behaving well.
I had a very happy and very educational childhood in the slum. I still prefer city streets to grass. 🙂
I might add that my neighborhood was a racially mixed one.
I can’t help feeling you were deprived of contact with salamanders, though.
I keep thinking about this comment and others. That city of yours doesn’t sound half bad, and neither does Linda’s farm. And I suppose I could make my small-town suburban roots seem appealing, if I tried. So it comes down to what you’re used to, and whether you were happy there. And I’m sure it’s the family that determines how happy you were. And the other people there.
The two cities around here are New Brunswick and Perth Amboy. They’re hellholes now, but I remember when they were nice. My mother had no qualms about getting on the bus, sometimes with a five-year-old Lee in tow, and going to Perth Amboy or New Brunswick for some shopping. There was nothing to be afraid of then.
But there is now. And plenty of it.
That’s the deal, it’s worse everywhere. The small city in which I grew up was a wonderful place at one time. Crime was minimal, the standard of living good. Now it has gang problems, crime, etc, etc. I was visiting a small town in the Midwest a while back, a truly lovely place, but saw one of the roughest looking kids I’d ever seen, hanging around in front of a store. I asked a local and was told that he probably was a meth-head and that they had a big problem with that in their little town.
Those stories come from all over.
With amazing consistency. Our world has become a much less decent place in the last fifty years. Society, as a whole, is reaping the fruit of its immorality.
Yes, the difference is one of time, not place. City children and country children alike — yes, Lee, and suburban children as well! — had safer and more constructive environments in the past. And I’m not just being an old fuddy-duddy in saying this. Facts speak for themselves. As a child, I could play in the streets by myself, could go to the store by myself — and even downtown on the subway by myself — and learned to earn my way and entertain myself with minimal resources. And the same was true of all my friends. All of us here who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s — maybe even the early 1960s — have said similar things.
Okay, so maybe I AM an old fuddy-duddy. But I earned the right to that, too. Funny … whenever I refer to myself as an Old Lady (I’m 76) and people protest that I’m “not really old,” I usually say, “Hey, don’t knock it. It took me a long time to get here.” It took a lot of hard work, too — and there were a couple of times when I didn’t think I’d make it to the next birthday. 🙂
I’m roughly 1/2 generation younger than you and remember that things were much more peaceful in my earlier days. My personal opinion is that the pivot point was 1967, the Six Day War, which saw Jerusalem back in Israeli hands for the first time since AD 70.
It seems to me that was when it all began to fall apart. There has been very little peace since then.
My mother was always warning me I was going to die a foolish death because of all the unnecessary risks I would take, but I never was stupid enough to eat detergent pods. I did try different drugs in college but realized being naturally healthy and breathing oxygen is the best “drug” of all (all because Jesus saved me during my college years).
I’ll bet you went to college in the late 60s or early 70s.
Looking back on it, I’m amazed by the intensity with which my peers desired me to join them in drug-taking. They kept at me about it night and day. That only made me more determined not to do it. Social pressure has always rubbed me the wrong way: I inherited that from my mother.