Kids These Days

Kids these days don't know how good they have it. When I was a boy, nothing was handed to us; we had to fight for everything.

I'm a proud member of what is at least the second greatest generation: Generation X. We struggled through the Great Recession, Pac Man Fever and "Battle of the Network Stars."

We didn't have any of these Xboxes or GameCubes with 3D graphics. We were lucky if we had 2D. And we couldn't play them in the comfort of our homes, we had to travel vast distances to dank and seedy places called arcades, with lighting more befitting a Bangkok whorehouse than a recreation center for children.

And we couldn't just jump on our Segways to get there, either. We traveled on clunky, manual-powered vehicles called BMX bikes.

We didn't have any of this fancy sex-charged hip-hop music back in my day. We had old-school rap. Braggart MC's would drone on endlessly about their shoes, or "the beat," or superiority at the simple act of holding a microphone. If we wanted misogyny and substance abuse we had to listen to Country music.

And there were no MP3 players back then. Our portable players weighed a dozen pounds and rested awkwardly on one shoulder. We called them, "boom boxes," and they played the now-obsolete cassette format. If we wanted to listen to a whole album, we had to eject the tape, physically turn it around, reinsert it into the gigantic player and press "play" again. It was maddening.

When we wanted to see a film, we couldn't just open a mailbox or download a file or digitally input it into our memories — whatever the kids are doing today. We actually had to travel to an aptly named Blockbuster store. If we wanted a current movie, the trip was pretty much a "bust" because anything good was always sold out. Do you know how many times I got stuck renting "Teen Wolf, Too"?

Don't get me started on these cell phones all the kids are using today. In my day, the only wireless communication device we had was called a walkee talkee. Guess how many people I had on my contacts list? One — Billy Stahl. He was my only best friend. If I wanted another, I would've had to buy a whole other set of walkee talkees. Nowadays kids can have 10 or 20 BFF's and no one bats an eye.

And you know what else kids don't have to deal with these days? An older generation talking down to them. My parents would go on and on about how lucky I was that I didn't have to wake up early to milk cows or plow fields or chop wood for the stove. It was degrading. Take it from me, Generation Y or Gen Next or whatever you're calling yourselves these days: be thankful you don't have to deal with that.

If you really want to talk, send Mike an e-mail. If it's urgent, buy an industrial-size spotlight with a W stencil and shine it into the night sky. Mike looks up regularly to check his messages.