These Kids Nowadays!

FrankDB, a bright commenter who often has good insight, makes an excellent comment on the increasingly unruly, disturbed and frankly immature behavior of the 18-23 crowd.

Just like 60 is the “new 40″ we need to think of 25 as the “new 18.” Kids from families who can afford it, don’t usually start living really on their own until then. The ones from families who can’t become what demographers call “detached youth” – 16-24 year olds who aren’t in school, employed or providing primary child care full time. The 0.5% percent of the population that commits half the homicides.

I’ve long proposed setting up a kind of semi-military without guns for them to live, work, eat and get an education. In the morning, they’d escort ghetto kids to school; then spend a few hours doing repairs in the neighborhood; then take their own vocational training in the afternoon. It’s kind of what the Army does to warehouse dumb southern white boys.

They used to do something like this in the USSR. In Thailand and Laos, most young men around 18-20 or so become monks and live in a monastery for a couple of years. Seems to be good for them. We used to force them to go into the military.

You know, I sound like an asshole when I say this, but I am having constant problems with young people these days. Their ages seem to range from about 16-23 or so. The worst ones of all seem to be around 18-23 or worse, 18-20. I had problems with them in my old town, then I moved to a new city, and now I am having problems with a whole new crop of them.

I’d like to point out that I have almost zero problems with real mature adults at all. I mean zero, nada, zip, zilch. All my problems are with young adults, mostly males but even some females.

They yell at me, tease me, torment me, threaten me, try to pick fights with me, on and on. They even tried to get me banned from one of the coffeeshops where they hang out on BS charges.

Around here they are Mexicans and they act way worse than the White shit-punks.

My sister deals with the same stuff. She was walking in the park, and they yelled at her, called her names and threw a condom at her. They were 18-20.

The common denominator here is that they are gang-involved, high school dropouts or headed that way, have criminal records, all still live with their parents, and never, ever, ever work. I’m not sure why they don’t work. So they have no bills, no responsibilities, no rent, no cars, and all day with nothing to do. Nothing to do but get in trouble. They spend all day long “hustling” which means begging, often very aggressively, for money. Any money they get is instantly blown within 24 hours, no matter how much it is.They can’t think beyond the next 24 hours.

Note that one of the common denominators is that they all still live with their parents. I hate to say it, but maybe people really need to get out on their own. Once they get out on their own, they seem to get a lot more mature real fast.

Unemployment just seems to be bad for you; there is something about it that seems to destroy the soul in many cases. Idle hands are the devil’s play. It would be better for the state to pay them $8/hour even to sweep the streets or something.

I hate to say we never acted this way when we were this age, because that reminds me of my father’s horrible lectures to us kids. But it’s true. When we were 18-23, we respected adults as long as they left us alone. We were mean to people our own age, but we left older adults alone. There was a respect your elders thing. Which seems to be gone altogether.

Also, we were allowed to live at home under strict conditions of either working fulltime, going to college fulltime, or working part time and going to school part time, though they generally wanted me to be in school fulltime. Any slacking off and refusing to either be in school or at work fulltime meant that I would be thrown out of the house, which was the correct policy. Even threats to take a semester off and bum around Europe or work at a ski resort were met with threats of eviction.

I was never thrown out, and I should have been if I broke those rules.