“I agree with Nero, I'm training the next generation of non-conforming children, we have a common enemy, parents. I have a couple of male grandchildren who see me as the beast. I teach them to shot, hunt, they like hanging out with, as my daughter calls me, ‘my crazy father.’ As you said, we put our souls on the shelf to raise them. Now I'm freed up to tell the next generation how I feel about the great Lie we have been fed, I buy them books, discuss the meaning that I now see. Life is grand.”
-Ishmael
I have recently had conversations with five different grandparents who are horrified with how our children are raising our grandchildren: institutional school settings from the cradle [supposedly better than being with a grandparent], so many toys they’d need the Army Corp of Engineers to help play with them all in a week, so little raw activity they seem spring-loaded, parental fun-time imbued with a sense of sacred escapism…
For the most part, people in their 20s and 30s have been so seduced by the system and their moral resources stretched so thin trying to desperately remain human themselves, that they are choosing the path of least resistance in the raising of a complaisant generation of martyr victims and guilt vectors. My writing has essentially estranged me from my entire family, with the exception of an athletic young man surrounded by dully dreaming flesh potatoes and a sharp young woman astonished by the soulless idiocy around her.
The basic concept of Why Grownups Suck is that the current crop of parents are so compromised at every level that our grandchildren are in for a front row seat in a dystopian novel they won’t be able to climb out of un-maimed, and maybe not at all unless they get some help from someone who remembers what the world was before everyone in it said yes to everything it demanded. With the destruction of the extended family—outlawed in the U.S.—and the rapid dismantling of the nuclear family by The State, grandparenting is a challenge, as one of the parents of your grandchildren is likely to be backed by The State—the modern child is leased State property rather than the scion of your family. But we have seen more and are wiser by far than our bamboozled children caught on the media hamster wheel. The odds are against us, but their is a chance, if only the laziness and lack of focus of our children in regards to theirs, which should hopefully give us some rational time alone with a young mind in an endangered corner of the animal barn.
If you are a grandparent with a story to tell about your brainwashed spawn squashing the souls of your grandchildren, or perhaps, if you, like I, had a grandmother or a great uncle who was thoughtfully bold enough to clue you in that their peers were idiots and their masters evil, you could tell that story as well via jameslafond dot-com at gmail dot-com and it will show up under whatever alias you choose under this tag: Why Grownups Suck.
First of all, parents aren't even really raising their kids nowadays. During the pre-K years, kids are raised by day care or Guatemalan nannies. After that, they're handed off to the State for 6 hours a day, often until 5 since you can pay the school to watch them after the school day ends.
After school, parents nowadays put their kids in endless expensive activities. Sometimes they'll be playing more than one sport in a season. It's usually sports. It gets kids fawning over black athletes early on just like their pudgy dads do.
During the summer, no kids stay home. Parents put them in summer camps all summer. Any mother that resists is worn-down by the reality that she is the only mom with kids at home during the summer.
Discussion amongst parents is intolerable. You have to hear how they've got their kid who's destined to be under 6' in some traveling sports team that costs $1500 and requires parents to stay in hotels all weekend with the team parents.
No kids are encouraged to work or learn a trade. All are encouraged to go to college. Parents forego any retirement savings to pay for college after they've spent a fortune on extra-curricular activities for their kids in K-12.
Unsurprisingly, most people don't want kids nowadays. This society can't last much longer.
Excellent dirty laundry list for a dying system.
Thanks, PR.
What can one say but that the culture of the land has been changed so much that the past was indeed a different country. What one often sees nowadays is that children command their parents rather than the other way around. My own parents were monumentally unpleasant and over bearing people who insisted I do everything according to their wishes and on their time schedule. Both my maternal and paternal grandparents had much the same attitude as well. However, as my parents were good, industrious providers and always had my meals ready on time, I was patient with them. Had they been poor and lazy I might have left them and run away to join the Army. Something I also notice is that one of the liabilities of having children in the current culture is that it seems to make all sorts of tiresome busybodies imagine that they have the right to intervene in your private affairs and tell you how to raise your children. The most vociferous of these busybodies typically will have no children of their own. Go figure it?Naturally hassles like this have come to make many in our millennial generation believe that children are naught but a burden rather than a blessing, so they aren't having any. It takes a village to screw up a child's mind.
Welcome back, Jeremy.
I'll be posting this as an article, as a number of readers have questioned me about your fate, missing your commentary.