In our child-hating culture, there’s another awful post circulating around the web. You can read the whole thing here; essentially it’s a rant about how entitled and disrespectful today’s kids are. Funnily enough, it’s attributed to Bill Gates; the attribution has been proven to be false, though anyone with a brain should be able to notice that right away given its redneck-like language.
The post goes on about how life’s not fair, kids’ self-esteem doesn’t matter, you have to flip burgers to succeed, not to whine, yadda yadda yadda. It’s a really disrespectful, child-hating rant that someone gleefully posted, perhaps while jealously looking on at a child with a better life than he had—or while remembering what an utter prick he was as a kid? Who knows.
One of the blogs I follow, Unschool Girls, wrote a rebuttal to the post here, and I absolutely am in love with it. Her first point, for example, is about how yes, life’s not fair—but we can’t get used to it, we have to DO something about it! That’s what people have done throughout the years. That’s how we got to vote, eliminated slavery, and got the 40-hour work week. Duh! She goes on to offer really beautiful words to today’s youth, who are desperately in need of them after their parents and grandparents—who might have worked hard while they did it—broke their freaking planet, wasted as many resources as possible, and voted in idiots who gave corporations power to sink this country, leaving them with less resources and opportunities, for the first time, than their previous generation.
Am I hating on adults? No, but I’m pointing out that adults like to blame youth on certain problems that they certainly did not cause. Why is it that we can’t handle kids making mistakes when we make them ourselves all of the time? Why is it okay for me to cry over a bill I can’t pay, but if a child loses a $5 note given to him by grandma, he gets grounded—or even spanked!—by his parents? Talk about an unfair world. The unfairness is created and maintained by adults, not children; it’s youth who are going to have to fix all of the mess we’ve landed ourselves in. Perhaps we should speak more kindly to and of them.
Especially if you want someone to wipe you clean in your old age…