I saw him walking toward me on the opposite side of the street as I parked. He was a lean-built young man with boyish features, dark brown hair combed to one side, and wearing a uniform of a nearby fast-food restaurant.
It was a routine summer Friday afternoon, my designated time for chores and errands. I got ready to leave the car, gathering up laundry, a bag of miscellaneous purchases and my notebook organizer and opened the car door. As the door shut, my arms full, a voice behind me interrupted my thoughts.
“Excuse me,” the young man said. “But would you dispose of my drink for me?”
There he stood, holding a large soft drink, of which about half had been consumed since leaving his place of employment about 300 hundred yards away. I stared at him for an instant, trying to comprehend this interruption, before replying.
“No,” I answered politely but firmly.
The boy, a resident of my neighborhood, then looked at me defiantly, threw the drink in the gutter walked off.
“That's a responsible approach to your problem,” I said sarcastically.
The youth whirled toward me; his face flushed with anger and answered, “What do you expect me to do?”
Rodney was neatly dressed, knew how to make a polite request, but like so many of us these days, is spoiled. He knew how to behave and make a proper request to get what he wanted, but thwarted, the politeness evaporated, revealing his infantile behavior. Rodney was accustomed to having “things” his way.
We Americans have an insatiable appetite for adolescent tastes, lifestyles and behavior. You only have to watch a little TV and see Bevis and Butthead, South Park, or Saturday Night Live to appreciate this. Our understanding of life is tied to our believing in quick fix solutions to complex problems and instant and limitless gratification. We mdon't want to be responsible. We have no stomach for having to commit ourselves to long, hard, tedious work to resolve problems we create. We want someone else to take responsibility for us. “Rodney” was simply behaving the way he has learned to behave to get what he wants.
America is becoming a nation of fat ADHD adolescents whose need and appetites for constant stimulation are provided by mindless television or movies with great visual effects and continuous edge-of-your-seat excitement, but little content. We are fascinated and addicted to slick computer games, featuring murder, mayhem and chaos, and, of course, the Internet. Like the ADHD adolescent, we cannot defer our gratification. We must have it all, and we must have it now. So we consume-drugs, alcohol, TV, movies, commercials, fast cars, fast food, and squander the planet's resources, dumping the leftovers, mistakes and refuse out-of-site, out-of-state, out-of-country, and definitely out-of-mind. There is no problem if we can't see it.
As we become more dependent upon gratifying our adolescent wants, we become increasingly sensitive to any criticism by others. I had an occasion while visiting my wife's elementary school to witness an incident in which two girls were mildly disciplined by a teacher for talking and making too much noise while waiting to perform in a school program. Their talking was disturbing other students and could have affected their performance. After the program these two girls, both fifth graders, complained to their mothers that their performances had been spoiled because the teacher had the gall to tell them to be quiet.
The two mothers, offended their little darlings had been so callously treated, immediately took the two girls in tow, sought out, confronted, and castigated the offending teacher for doing her job, and “ruining” their daughters' performances. The fact their daughters had been misbehaving was obviously irrelevant. Their poor performance was entirely the teachers' fault.
Whatever happened to parents who supported teachers and told their children to listen and to behave in school? In my youth, my mother may have taken issue with what a particular teacher did, but that was between her and the teacher. To the students and to their children, teacher and parents presented a unified front. We were told to behave and obey the rules, if we misbehaved and were disciplined, we were told “In the future behave yourself and get over it.”
Americans go to the suburbs to escape the city, or move south and west to escape “problems” in rust belt cities, and then tell ourselves these “problems” belong to someone else. Our vision of the future is building ring worlds in outer space to escape the pollution and ugliness we have created on planet Earth. We divorce our mates rather than face and resolve issues. We consume people and resources and discard them rather than train or retrain people or recycle resources. Americans are caught in a negative feedback loop of forever trying to recreate our ideal image of a virgin, so we can rape and use her as we wish, then force her into prostitution on our behalf and when we're finished, discard her in disgust with what we have done. This we call civilization.
