Fractured not Broken

The tragedy of youth, goes the expression, is that it’s wasted on the young. Actually, from what I can remember of my own childhood, riding dinosaurs and helping Noah fill the Ark after school, the usual pre-historic stuff, the actual tragedy is how much of what enriches young people is dependent on money they never possess. And how holes no one ever sees eventually consume the person concealing them.

I’m astounded staring at the tabloids and ‘zines at the grocery check-out exactly what kind of a world I have helped create by doing nothing. I’m not talking about the celebrity wastes of skin, we have always had those from right around the time Marie Antoinette suggested a swap out of foodstuffs that caused her a terrible headache.

I mean the two to three hundred dollar ‘sports shoes’ that we called sneakers growing up and would never dream of calling them that now with warm-up clothes priced to move at about two and half times a monthly car payment. And because we can’t tell the difference between real and knock-off, don’t think our children’s peers can’t or won’t.

When clothes make the man to be weighed and found wanting is a terrible burden and almost more than can be borne. And then we wonder why so many school-age children, ranging from primary grades through college are on every form of narcotic and tranquilizer that a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry can imagine (and a few others that street corners supply). If you can’t hope, then cope and hang on until, exactly what? The World of Things seems to be all that counts.

I think those of us who are parents want our children, of any age, to be happy and everything and anything else beyond that is more or less gravy. So what can and should we do to create an environment where happiness is most likely to flourish? If I had that answer, you’d be watching me on a TV talk show right now.

But rather, I don’t think whatever it has a lot to do with money (I hope not because we didn’t have much in my house for our kids) but perhaps our time, and more the quality of it, rather than the amount. Nothing is wasted on the next generation, ever, except the opportunity to help them succeed in the only life they, or we, will ever know.
-bill kenny