Parent's your kid's aren't that special
Exhibit A: My wife and I have just been seated for dinner when the maitre d' walks over and seats a young family at the table next to us and the kids start carrying on like orangutans on a leash.
The parents are going, "Timmy, that's not nice, don't throw your food, stop stuffing your mashed potatoes up your nose." Are mom and dad having fun yet, picking food up off the floor, apologizing to people like us, and wiping food flung across the table off their faces?
Some parents still have this attitude that their kids are too special to be burdened by discipline. And the rest of us are supposed to put up with their little mutants. That attitude really pisses me off.
I hate to break it to them, but the kids aren't special, and I don't have to put up with their behavior. If you can't control your obnoxious little brats, leave them home.
They don't belong out in public annoying other people, period. I don't remember a generation of kids ever so indulged and enabled to behave so badly. What's going on?
I remember as a kid I was expected to behave myself out in public or suffer the wrath of one very angry father. And of all the things that used to piss him off, those expectations didn't seem unreasonable. Something's gone terribly wrong here. My guess is it has to do with the breakdown of authority, the collapse of strong family structure, and the abdication of parental responsibility, dictated in part by the necessity that both parents work.
Plus, we have a whole generation of Baby Boomers who are too busy feeling entitled to prolong their own self-indulgent, self-absorbed adolescences to rein in their own kids.
, I've read it once before but thought I should read it again since the Ethanol subsidies argument is coming up again. I'd recommend everyone read this book to see a great plan on how we really could win the energy battle.
