The world is going to hell in a grocery basket

Has anyone else noticed how crass and uncouth the world is becoming? It seems more and more the young people of America act as though the older generations owe them something and when they don’t receive what they expect the get rude and belligerent over it. In the past two days I have experience a couple of things that I just never fathomed would ever happen.


The first incident happened while I was picking up a few items at the grocery store the other night. I went to the 20 items or less self-checkout. As I was nearing the end of my checkout task, two young men came up and put their three items on the belt. One boy looks at the other and says “isn’t this 20 items or less,” the other boy says “yup,” then proceeds to lean into my cart and count, yes count my items! He then says “well she only has 13” then they turned around to wait their turn. Actually, I had 9 rude little punk! Needless to say, I did what any self respecting “old” person would do, and I paid the little machine with the cash I had, with the smallest bills I had, one at a time! At what point did we quit teaching our children to respect their elders; or to respect anyone for that matter? Or even their selves?

This lack of respect, I believe, comes from faulty parenting. As I mentioned before, when both parents work outside the home, either the job or the children suffer. When children are being left to be raised by MTV and the ridiculous “reality” shows therein, and all “reality” shows for that matter, the examples they are seeing are gross exaggerations of how people really are. They see people who make it their business to create a hostile environment among their peers so that people will watch the shows to see what happens next! But in the young viewers’ immature mind, they do not understand that these behaviors are being acted out for this purpose. They begin to form the idea that these rude behaviors are the example of how to be in life.

The other incident I am about to describe is truly a scary one. Last night as my pregnant daughter and her boyfriend drove home, something happened with another driver. I was not with them, so I do not know exactly what happened. But my daughter frantically calls me to tell me that the man followed them back to our house and proceeded to exit his vehicle and threaten my daughter and her boyfriend! My daughter then tells me, this man’s two young children were in the vehicle and the man had said the only reason he was not going to do anything further was because his kids were there. Buddy, you have already done the damage! You just taught your children that it is ok to chase someone down and threaten them and go through with it as long as no one else is there! That is a great example of bad, bad parenting! Instead the parent should have shown restraint and went on about his business, giving his children the lesson that sometimes things happen that we don’t like, but we do not have to respond in a crazy and out of control way. I bet his children are going to make wonderful bullies someday! Our children must rely on their parents to teach them self-restraint; they will never see this on television.

One last thing to ponder here: 75% of today’s youth are unfit to join our military! They are either high school dropouts, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit to join. As parents it is our duty to ask ourselves what we can do to turn this statistic around!