There is a strange feeling of being at a great height and near the edge as I think about the world today’s children are inheriting. A feeling that we have climbed too high to easily climb down. It feels as if the only way to reach solid earth again is to fall, something that benefits no one.
Least of all the youth of today.
Kids today have entered a world where the adults are restless.
Without a great war to unite us, a great cause to force us together we pull at one another’s sleeves.
We spit at one another’s images and names.
We forever feel as if we are missing out on something as we doomscroll through social networks and try to contain our jealousy as we look at our own lives and scowl.
We have kids raised in a world with more ways to reach out than is imaginable and we try to figure how to safely wade them out into this bigger world where all it seems there are is predators.
Sure, kids can be awful.
They can be angry, and foolish, and mean, and dangerous.
We’re the ones that made them that way.
And we’re the ones that prey on them.
Adults are the ones that tell kids to act their age, to grow up, and to get jobs but when they want to act more adult and DO more adult things we get upset at how they grow up too fast.
We blame the media when we’re the ones that talk about them having boyfriends and girlfriends in Kindergarten.
We’re the ones that dress them up like dolls and paint their faces to look older because it’s fun.
It’s cute.
We warn them away from social media when we’re the predators.
Sure, they overshare, they bully, and they send pictures and words to one another they shouldn’t, but again…who do they learn all that behavior from?
We have no interest in trying to curb gun proliferation and insist we have no idea how to stop gun violence so we punish kids. We make school even less fun than it could possibly be.
We put in metal detectors.
We make them wear uniforms.
We make them use clear backpacks or NO backpacks.
We treat them like numbers and if you aren’t lucky enough to be born in a wealthier area then your best bet is an education at a charter school that may or may not be up to the standards of everyone else.
What sort of lives do we think we’re making for kids?
We’re telling them that they need to bootstrap it when we didn’t.
We tell them not to want a shortcut to success like the social media influencers but for some of them it’s the best bet they have.
We’re killing industries, killing off jobs, and now they have to compete with their parents for jobs so what do we want them to do?
And this is all coming from someone that’s consistently frustrated by kids and how they act and what they do but again, they learn everything from someone else. And in the end, they learn it from us.
Even if they learn to be idiots from their friends their friends had to learn that behavior from someone.
Just as the toddler that tells people to shut up didn’t teach themselves that. They learned it from an adult or from another kid who heard it from an adult.
It’s heartbreaking to think of the future they are inheriting.
We are destroying this planet.
We are grown children that want to fight, and cause drama.
We cannot stop warring with one another over what is essential our egos because it’s who we are.
We are allowing a small percentage of obscenely wealthy people rule us like kings and queens as they buy up one another’s companies only to fire everyone and crater them because they don’t have that much interest in them in the first place.
Adults have become petulant children while we tell the kids to grow up because someone has to act mature because it ain’t us.
And I think about how it starts, with their education, and how we treat them, and what we expect and the thing is that we want things from kids we don’t even ask of ourselves. We expect more from them than ourselves.
They can’t live their own lives, they need to live ours too.
And it’s no wonder they are going crazy and struggling.
They are living in two worlds, childhood and adulthood, and neither is what we want from them, and so they have no idea what to be.
And that’s on us.
…c…
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 