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This is the Eye of Grace. This is where the world is set straight before your simple minds. This is where the shit hits the fan.
You are nothing without me.
Generation Zero
[Generation Zero; noun, middle class suburban pre-teen and teen kids who live their lives online]
“Shooting in Columbine school kills 13 children”
“Melanie, 12, kidnapped and raped by internet ‘lover’”
“Pre-teens arrested for robbing local police station”
“Third graders arrested for plotting teacher’s death on MySpace”
“11 year old girl beaten unconscious by eight over online dispute”
The Pop Generation, Generation X, the Flower Power generation, the Punk movement, the 80’s Brat Packs, the Grunge Crowd… we’ve had them all. No matter which one we belonged to, I am sure we all think we rocked ours the hardest, flying that flag of youth and know-it-all asshole rebellion to new levels, never before seen by the ones that came before us. Yeah, right… We were all dumbasses, but at least we were evolving dumbasses who grabbed our youth by its horns and rode that motherfucker until the break of dawn. We still turned out all right. No matter how much Elvis’ hips corrupted the young, no matter how many drugs the hippies did and no matter how many people Ozzy told us to kill on backward masked messages, we sure as hell turned out just fine. We didn’t fuck up our world too much, and we’re leaving a somewhat functioning society to our children. Sure, we have not left everything in perfect order; our old eat cat food to be able to afford medicine and our neighborhood streets are turning into crack head battlegrounds, but on a whole the ship is still running with taxes and death fully intact at the helm, staying the course.
As has been custom by the torchbearers of generations past, it is my duty and privilege to complain and woe at the thought of the “kids of today”, before passing that torch on, and piss and moan about how they will fuck up the world. Only difference is that I will, of course, be right and that all the old farts before me had no fucking clue what they were talking about.
The point of my gripe is this: Today’s young generation, Generation Zero, won’t have the skills to operate a bloody toaster, much less a whole country.
Building Castles in the Sand
It used to be like that; a family spending the day at the beach; kids playing in the shallows and building castles in the sand. You would build a huge fortress of smelly seaweed and mud, decorate it with sea shells and broken glass and then dream up scenarios to be played out between the toy soldiers you brought from home and the hermit crab you just captured and stuck in the mote as some sort of Guardian Crocodile. Sometimes other kids would come by to join in, and sometimes you just played by yourself – either scenario was perfectly fine.
As you grew older you expanded your horizons by interacting with your closest friends, talking about life and reality, putting your own spin on the way things worked in your world, filling in the blanks and guessing the rest. You learned social skills by engaging in sports or other activities, relishing the joys of winning and dying the grief of defeat while tasting the blood in your mouth as adrenaline rushed through your body, and also by realizing that many are stronger than one as your team picked up the game and won on days when you, yourself, sucked.
These days the closest thing kids get to an adrenaline rush is watching the kill meter fill up as they play Dynasty Warriors on the 360, or the pang of excitement in a little girl heart as “Brawny_Bill69” signs into the chat room. I am not kidding, I see my daughter, and all her friends, strapping themselves into their computers after school to zone out on the internet, hopping from page to page, checking up on each other and spreading whatever word needs to be spread that day. Their whole life exists only as an online experience together with other, mostly, anonymous people hiding behind screen names that make them sound more interesting than they are. Battles are fought in chat rooms, hearts are broken in private messages, rumors are spread on message boards and legions of kids live and die by what strangers half way across the world think of them. Hey, at least the sex is safe.
OK, I may have lived “The Sandlot” and “Stand by Me” as a kid, but even though I realize that not everybody out there did, we at least had a whole other set of social skills by the age this generation is still trying to figure out how to become even hotter online by adding a pink font to their log-in name. There is a hell of a difference between calling somebody out for something they said or did to you in person, telling them to meet you on the hill behind the gym after school, and calling somebody a fucking bitch in a chat room on the internet. One has immediate concrete consequences that could result in broken bones and bruised egos, and the other just fades into the background white noise of a million other pointless insults and empty threats in the Matrix. There is a difference of epic proportions between gathering up the nerve to ask that girl you have had a crush on for over a year out on a date, and telling HotzBitch12 that you would like to lick her clit in a PM.
On the internet the kids are all Prince Charming, a Jonas brother, Jenna Jameson, Brad Pitt, Hannah Montana and Will Smith – all rolled into one – creating an identity crisis for themselves and everybody involved. It’s easy to be tough, sexy, funny, smart and interesting when you basically made up every scrap of who you are, but try doing that in real life to the kids in your school and see what happens. The problem is that nothing happens even then. First of all, we have desensitized our kids to the umpteenth power, so they don’t even care to spark that fight to clear the air – they would rather go home and get some guns so they can go Columbine on the whole school instead – and second of all, they lack the actual skills to fight in person. It is healthy for a human being to get his dick knocked in the dirt a few times during his lifetime. It teaches us humility, limitations and shows us what we did wrong so we can learn from our mistakes. It also teaches us to strategize better the next time and work the world to our advantage before trying again. It teaches us to duck, dodge and counter attack. Getting your face ground in the dirt while your whole class stands around you laughing should be a rewarding experience to build character for future endeavors. Not necessarily for another cafeteria shooting, but a valid lesson learned in the way the world actually works. The same rules and laws we apply to our modern day grown up life, be it on a political level or just in the work place, are the same basic guidelines you should know on the play ground or at recess. If you throw shit at somebody, be prepared to back it up – if you can’t, be prepared to eat shit with a vengeance.
Humans are much more complicated, socially and emotionally, than this shallow MySpace experience allows the kids of today to realize. There is a certain Human Codex for what makes people tick and how relationships between people from all walks of life function. Action and interaction. Cause and effect. Crime and punishment. Life and death. Respect and responsibility. At the age of 12, you won’t learn that online. All you will learn, eventually, is that the guy out in the parking lot, sniffing your bicycle seat, is the very same person as the 14-year old boy in chat who knows Zack and Cody and who can get you back stage after the Miley Cyrus concert.
Basically we are leaving our kids to roam their superficial little world, all alone in their own little heads, to conjure and exorcise mere ghosts of actual people and to flicker in and out of shadows of reality without any of the tools they need to learn to actually cope with life. What is the payoff? Where is the greater reward? There is none for us parents as we are raising a dumb, disrespectful and lazy generation that totally lacks social skills. There is none for the kids as they grow more transparent and hollow as the days tick away in the bottom right corner.
We have created a Monster Baby Sitter that has taken the place of the before, oh, so threatening TV, and we have thrown our kids into his lair, hide and hair, to be consumed and forgotten. Do we expect them to just emerge from that cave one day, fully cooked and ready to grab life by the horns? Are we all too busy rubbing genies out of bottles to wake up and smell the fucking coffee? Our kids are sliding down a slippery slope here, and it’s our fault for not setting the boundaries and limits for what goes and what doesn’t.
“Boring is as boring does”
All of Generation Zero is bored out of its skull, desperately cruising the electronic highways of Face Book and video gaming to feel something. Anything. Like junkies they crash and burn through layers of nothingness, chasing that rush of remote sensation, looking for a fix of life. And they find nothing. There is nothing to stimulate their imagination, to tickle their senses and to encourage them to dream and hope.
We are so afraid that our children will be kidnapped by a pedophile fuckhead, or become pregnant by some jock, or die in a car crash on a Friday night, or be generally subjected to all the weird shit out there (and there is plenty), that we have built big golden cages for them to live out their youths inside, in quiet and safe solitude. Like a nursing home for the young. To pacify them, and to quench their natural thirst for action, we have supplied them with everything they could possibly ever need to just quietly wait at their finger tips. You need a song? Rip it from LimeWire. You want to vent? Post on the message board. You feel angry? Chainsaw somebody in the face on Gears of War. You feel lonely? There are plenty of lonely men who would love to chat. You need to go to the store to get something? Don’t worry, I’ll pick it up after work. No, you don’t need to mow the lawn – that’s what we have illegal immigrants for. Just stay inside, I’ll serve you your food in your room.
Generation Zero never needs to look forward to something because it is all right there. Everything they need to keep their little life running is right the hell there in front of them, at the push of a button. Instant gratification on an IV drip. Maybe if we keep them docile and sedated nothing bad will ever happen to them.
Unfortunately, kids who get bored do some weird shit, because it is in their nature.
Suicides used to be the angst of choice for generations past, but lo and behold; Columbine wasn’t exactly a cry for help. It’s not that THEIR lives sucked, just that life, in itself, sucked, so everybody else should thus die as well. This new sport with kids, to video film (excuse me, cell phone film) how they beat up innocent people for just passing them by in the street, is a symptom of being fucking bored. Just the fact that they put it up on YouTube, minutes after, without blurring their own faces, shows you that they don’t even know this shit is actually real. It’s all just part of their world. Music and movies are stolen off the internet (excuse me, file-shared), blurring the lines between yours and mine, between right and wrong. Sure we home taped all our shit, and passed it on, but we didn’t advertise it and take it for granted.
Bored and frustrated girls go into chat rooms and hook up with older guys that “pay attention” to them. And look at all the same interests they share. Of course older men are just as hooked on the new Good Charlotte album as you are, and school blows! You understand each other! When can you meet? Without an actual physical human friend there to pull them away by the elbow, saying that the guy is a creep, there is nothing putting that barrier in place between the predator and the prey. The game is on, and our kids are losing.
The lack of compassion comes from being desensitized to all the stuff you can Google on the internet these days. I remember acquiring my first porn rag and hiding it in the walk in closet we kept all our winter clothes in, on the bottom shelf, where the boots were. I was 12 and I felt like a criminal. I would sneak a glance ever so often, and then always tuck it away again, hidden from the world. These days the kids have hotfuckedteens.com bookmarked on their laptops and you can always watch web videos of drunken girls being passed around at a frat party as everybody is hollering and hooting around her. The lines in the sand are slowly being washed away, as wave after wave of all the stuff you are to be slowly introduced to as you are mature enough to understand it, come crashing in through the Ethernet cables. How do you explain to your 12 year old daughter why that girl, dressed in a nurse uniform and red fish nets, has a cock the size of an arm shoved into her ass? How do you explain pussy squirting, scat and chewed off nipples? You don’t, because she doesn’t ask. But she sees it. Rest assured. And she wonders about it. Fuck, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as anal sex until I was 17, and then I spent three years wishing I could unlearn it as the thought of it seemed alien to me. People biting each other for pleasure? Shitting on each other? Please. Young naïveté… a lost art. Our kids are already jaded experts of sexual deviance and have seen everything there is to see before they have even experienced their first kiss. And they don’t care. It’s like a game, forwarding links to each other on the craziest stuff they can find on the net: “check it out, plz!11!1 his cock is liek a fucking tree!11! check out da bitch on da floor! is she even awake???// lolz lolz shell b soor 2morrow dontcha think”. (I’ll be covering the linguistic mudslide of this Generation Zero in another article.) Sex holds no mystery or magic to them. It’s all there; laid out in its plain naked truth for all to see, leaning against the ugly tree for the most part.
Same thing with everything else. You want to know what a gunshot to the head looks like? Google it. Want to know what it feels like to be raped? Read about it on people’s blogs. Hell, laugh about it. It’s not real anyway. Or is it? It doesn’t matter, because life is lived in 5 second intervals in a gold fish bowl, where nothing affects you anyway.
After a while these sensory depraved kids feel the natural urge to live out some hell bent frustration. What do you do when you are desensitized to the most fucked up things the dark side of life has to offer, and you haven’t learned to respect life?
Right.
We’re in fucking trouble.
Left to their own devices, kids will inevitably re-create the Lord of the Flies all over again. It’s a done deal. Children are, by default, stupid and evil - not because we dropped them on their heads, but because they are supposed to be stupid and evil. Humans are only civilized animals, and the civilized part is only learned through the years as we grow up to think for ourselves and interact with other humans. We suppress our children’s evil side and teach them about compassion and fair play. We’re not orangutans in the jungle – we wear pocket protectors and vote, for crying out loud! If we, for some reason, stray from our task of teaching our children about compassion and fair play, they will turn out to be psychopathic serial killers. No pressure. It’s our job, after all.
The Downward Spiral
So what happens if we stray from the task of teaching a whole generation about what goes and what doesn’t?
Well, we will have a whole litter of young men and women who were taught their social skills in chat rooms, who fought and died on message boards, stood up the day after and remained stupid and evil. They are master network agents, but since they never really networked with real people, they can’t apply this to the reality they are about to face. All of a sudden they will have to find their balls and actually do something. Perish the thought! They haven’t even had to think for themselves for a whole lifetime, so far, and now they are expected to just join the flow of Grown Up Land? They never lived in the shadow of the Bomb. They weren’t doofed in the back of their heads for forgetting to call a friend of their dad’s “Sir”. They never fought for anything, and therefore neither won it nor lost it. They know nothing. Their whole data base of knowledge is a potpourri of urban legends, last minute Wikipedia, flash sequences of “life” as seen on YouTube and cyber virginities lost in instant message conversations. All of a sudden you have to make decisions, pull your weight, come up with a plan and see it through. They are going to crack and they are going to want to go back into their golden cages. The real world sadly has no place for a Level 60 Necromancer with a 3–11 Fire Damage Bone Staff. Really.
And what do we do when 20 million people just don’t show up for work one day? Especially since their grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ diapers need to be changed at the nursing home. Right, we collapse as a nation and then the illegal immigrants take over. They could never afford the internet to begin with and all learned how to survive in a hard climate. Their kids mowed the fucking lawn, rest assured. Your fucking lawn. They didn’t grow up in la la land.
We will wake up one day and have Emilio Ortega Panchez for President, speaking only Spanish, and it’s all our fault for not smacking the shit out of our kids every once in a while, and for not kicking them out of the house to fend for themselves in the real world.
I don’t know about you, but I am doing my damndest to make sure my daughter doesn’t become a part of Generation Zero, even though she is applying for a membership to that club already as we speak. From now on she gets one hour computer a day, and then she has to do something useful and boring. And eat Brussel Sprouts. That always worked wonders (I turned out all right). And liver. And I will see if I can pick a real fight for her with some other kid, so she can either get her ass kicked or knock that kid’s dick in the dirt. Either way is fine. It will build character, and I will hopefully be safe in my old days.
Kids these days.
Fucking spineless parasites.
~ The Eye of Grace ~
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