Your Childhood Is a Lie

Your childhood was nothing like you say.

                You see it on the social media updates, memes posted here and there, opinion pieces in the news. At times it gets heavy enough that it’s given features in credible news magazines, time on radio or television, bloated, stat-heavy reports. Jokes, commentaries, studies. Attacks, basically—because they’re rarely disguised as anything else—on these gat dam KIDS these days.

                Yes. Kids. Those spoiled, egocentric, entitled, obese, lazy, sheltered, narcissistic, shallow kids. Oh, and their phones.

                You can’t thumb through any news feed without seeing something ridiculing them, their values, their parents, their music (okay, sometimes that’s gotta be said), or their world. Their world.

                At some point in the past ten years we appear to have reached an agreement to say that Millenials are the very worst generation and everyone just sort of accepted it. Even them.

How could they not?

They were hearing about our childhoods. So simple. So pure. So hardworking and outdoorsy and satisfied with what we earned—nothing was given—so full of respect for durn near everyone. A time of values and motivations, goodness and manners.

Utter bullshit.

When I was a kid, I was pretty sure that my parents and grandparents were making their childhood suffering sound worse, their innocence sound purer, and their appreciation of everything greater. I know that we are doing the same. We are lying to them and to ourselves, and for once both are believing it.

Did we drink from garden hoses? Sure. Play outside? Lots. Have a single rotary phone and a party line? Damn straight.

But weren’t we also told that our feelings mattered and that we were each of us special? Wasn’t there winter eight months of the year? Did every household not have a Nintendo? Would we not have been all over smart phones had they been offered to us in Dukes of Hazard cases?

(And anyone who’s telling you smart phones are a Millennial problem has never attended a staff meeting or dinner party in a decade. No one pays attention to anyone else, not just them dag-blamed kids.)

Our hypocrisy is paper thin. We claim to have spent twelve hours a day outside unsupervised in a country where winter lasts until May, and yet we also managed to watch Goonies and Ghostbusters  eighty times each, as well as enough Transformers, He-Man, and G.I.Joe to choke a cat. We finished Mario Bros 1-3, a couple of Zeldas, and we managed to have every tape transitioning from hair metal to grunge.

We’re full of it. It’s a fantasy. And we expect kids to buy it because we’re buying it ourselves.

It’s gotta make you feel for kids these days. They are being told that they’ve inherited a dystopia that they're pretty much responsible for ruining. And yet, somehow, they also don’t appreciate it. They hear our lies of a gentler, nicer era (during the Cold War where our grandparents had once beaten up the town's one Chinese kid and parents disowned their pregnant daughters) and I guess they must think when they live extra especially sucks. Based on what they’re told.

Fact is, there were stupid and spoiled and selfish people when we were kids. And when our grandparents were.

This world we’re describing to them never happened. I don’t know if it’s built on resentment or  it’s built on self-delusion, but it’s balderdash and that’s that.

There are always going to be kids these days.