In March of 2009, circumstances landed both my daughter and I under the same roof for the first time since she was two years old.\u00a0 On her part, the circumstances were that her mother was about two inches from having her committed to whatever facility they had in Orlando where parents send kids they Simply Cannot Deal With, and being suddenly uprooted and shipped off to a tiny little shitburg in Oklahoma seemed like a better idea than basically having her locked up.<\/p>\n
One thing I noticed right from the get-go — something I hadn’t noticed during the various visitations I’d had with her and her brother over the years — was that she seriously lacked any respect for anything.\u00a0 I tried working on it, making a point to be precisely what her mother wasn’t (at least according to my daughter), but that pretty much ended the moment I caught her out in a particularly egregious bit of wrongdoing.\u00a0 Of course, by this time she was over eighteen, making most courses of action less than effective.<\/p>\n
But I’ve reached a conclusion after three years of dealing with not just her, but her friends (and given the sparse population around here, understand that this really means “damn near every 18-23ish kid in the county”).\u00a0 I don’t think it’s just her.\u00a0 I think the vast majority of kids her age suffer from a complete lack of social skills.<\/p>\n
I don’t think it’s all of them, of course, and I have my theories on what sort of kids might be more inclined to avoid this — kids from well-off families with both parents and reasonably stern discipline — but it seems pretty universal around here.\u00a0 These kids are chronically self-absorbed, lack any true sense of courtesy, and expect everything to be handed to them without them putting in any effort first.\u00a0 (I should note that when I refer to “courtesy”, I don’t mean “politeness”; in fact, there are a veritable boatload of Eddie Haskells in the neck of the woods, if you catch my drift.)<\/p>\n
Some examples:<\/p>\n
That’s just a taste.\u00a0 I mean, I could go on for 5,000 words here.\u00a0 But like I said, I have theories, and I think the biggest problem these kids have these days is that they grew up in an era where their social interaction has been far more skewed toward the internet.\u00a0 Whether it’s Facebook or MMORPGs or textaholism or spending hours with a headset shooting people on a console, these kids have been dealing with their peers in ways that folks even 5-10 years older than them never did as kids.\u00a0 Hell, I’ve been online long enough to have used an actual 300 baud modem to dial up BBSs, but it still wasn’t until I had broadband that I finally reached a point where more of my interaction with people was online than actually going out to do things.\u00a0 When I was 21, if I wasn’t at a bar after work, I’d be hanging out in a car wash parking lot with literally dozens of other people, or hanging out at the bowling alley, or out on a date.\u00a0 If someone wanted to talk to me, they had to either find me or call and leave a message and wait for me to get home.\u00a0 Now, nobody has to find anyone, and these kids just come home and plug into the internet.<\/p>\n
And as a result, they don’t know how to deal with other people, because they’ve learned how<\/em> to deal with other people in a venue where you can lash out and hurt others without any real repercussion other than having them lash out right back at you.\u00a0 When I was 21, if you wanted to say half the shit these kids say to one another on Facebook, you had to do it to their face.<\/p>\n And you know what usually ended up happening then, don’t you?<\/p>\n That’s right.\u00a0 I have reached the conclusion that kids these days are prone to being discourteous narcissists precisely because they’ve been able to be absolutely horrid little assholes to one another without actually having to worry about getting their asses kicked.\u00a0 What a wonderful world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In March of 2009, circumstances landed both my daughter and I under the same roof for the first time since she was two years old.\u00a0 On her part, the circumstances were that her mother was about two inches from having her committed to whatever facility they had in Orlando where parents send kids they Simply … Continue reading “A Plague of Discourtesy.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-get-off-my-lawn"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2yTWH-8","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions\/9"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jonfmorse.com\/vent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}