Getting Older: The Next Generation

[ROX]

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious
diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what
with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning... uphill BOTH ways...
through year 'round blizzards. Carrying their younger siblings on their
backs ... to their one-room schoolhouse, where they maintained a
Straight-A average, despite their full- time, after school job at the local textile mill....
where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep
their family from starving to death.
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no
way in heck I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about
how hard I had it and how easy they've got it.

But now that...
I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around
and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared
to my childhood, you live in a darn Utopia! And I hate to say it but
you kids today you don't know how good you've got it. I mean, when I
was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something,
we had to go to the darn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!
There was no email. We had to actually write somebody a letter...
with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put
it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!
There were no MP3's or Napsters...You wanted to steal music, you had to
hitchhike to the darn record store and shoplift it yourself. Or you had
to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually
talk over the beginning and screw it all up!
And talk about hardship? You couldn't just download porn. You had
to steal it from your brother or bribe some homeless dude to buy you a
copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11. Those were your options.
We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting. If you were on the phone
and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it. And we
didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either... when the phone
rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your school, your mom,
your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just
didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances!
We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with
high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600 with games like
"Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass. Your guy
was a little square... you actually had to use your imagination!
And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen
forever. And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and
harder and faster and faster until you died! ... Just like LIFE!
When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium
seating. All the seats were the same height. If a tall guy or some
old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were
just screwed!
Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15
channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control. You had
to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on. You
were screwed when it came to channel surfing... you had to get off your
butt and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no
Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday
morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for
cartoons, you spoiled little bastards!
And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had
to use the stove or go build a frigging fire. Imagine that! If we
wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing and shake it
over the stove forever like an idiot. That's exactly what I'm talking
about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled.
You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980.