To Be Young In America Is a Dystopian Reality

Hurrah, we caught one and killed one.  Two less man-child murderer/terrorists off the streets. And while I'm happy Boston can sleep tonight, something tells me we Americans will have many more sleepless nights in our future.

Remember back when losers just dug
up fossils while trying to dig a pool?
Or tried to be comedians without
a fully functioning brain?  

Most of our "terror" will be at the hands of twenty year old "losers," as the uncle of the Tsarnaev brothers perfectly labeled them. I don't care right now that they were also Chechen immigrants and most likely Muslim.  To me they are just more homegrown disillusioned youngsters with anger issues.

Losers. They're everywhere. Always have been.

But thanks to modern media and social networks, losers now get to grand stand.  "You hurt me cruel world, and I will lash out like a viper." I think I liked it better when they used their voice to say things like, "Too ugly to prostitute, anything helps," on cardboard by the side of the road.  At least then, losers still were dependent on the people who alienated them in the first place. And to some extent, this type of "system failure begging," showed the world in a visual way that the American Way often leaves people behind. I think it's the reason we as a society, love the rags to riches story so much.  We want to believe that anyone, ANYONE, can raise themselves up by the bootstraps.

Why should anyone, quasi-celebrity or not, have
to defend themselves from trolls.  

Whatever bootstraps r? #old-person-saying #lame #notabelieber

Sorry for the random tween tweet statement, but that is how some of these new adults think. Some have used the entirety of their creative powers to become professional trolls on websites. They mock everything everybody does. They offer nothing but cynicism and negativity to any situation. We have raised a generation filled with haters.

The eldest Tsarneav tweeted recently, "I have no American friends.  I don't understand them."

And while I seriously don't want to sympathize with a coward terrorist, I do understand his sentiment. Many young American adults are weird. We taught them not to bully in school, so they played nicely for eight hours, only to go home and release unrelenting cyber hate.  Ask any young person how often they've been victims of character assassination via facebook, twitter, reddit, tumblr, etc. and most likely they'll say more times then they can remember.

Should we be surprised that social media for teens is where gossip, accusations, and exaggeration of events are rampant? Only now it can be seen by the whole student body instead of between four cliquish friends.

Because we bought them their laptops, their cell phones, their text packages, their xbox live cards; and told them that computers and the information age would revolutionize the world.  And slowly, they forgot how to socialize like humans. The natural developmental angst that used to turn teens into garage bands, horrible poets, and ugly fashionistas, has evolved into internet hackers, PS3 vegetables, and cell phone viewing zombies.

The cyber world is not a happy world. The only medication it gives sick and depressed minds is motivation to continue further into insanity.  Think of the two different cities where young boys raped girls, then, because their moral center was so diluted, thought it best to text pictures of their crime to friends and post inflammatory statements on the victims' facebook page.  What the hell is wrong with these boys?  What is wrong with kids?

Should we be surprised this is normal?  When students commit suicide to make a statement to their classmates? When alienated children kill with guns?  When unemployed, unhappy young adults have fantasies of huge death tolls?

It reminds me of a line from 17-year-old Clarisse from Fahrenheit 451, the very social girl who was forced to see a therapist (ironically for anti-social tendencies) in the futuristic world, because she rejected technology for human interaction and nature.  She said, "Sometimes I'm ancient. I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always use to be that way?...I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid."

How can we turn around a generation and a half filled with losers? Human interaction. We need to throw the technology in the trash and embrace people again. We need to hang out physically instead of in chat rooms or on Skype sessions. We need to tease people in public and let them see and hear our sarcasm instead of misreading it on facebook.  We need thicker skin.

College kids celebrate the capture of the 2nd bomber with
Boston police officers.  Photo credit Jim Davis/Globe staff

We need to turn off the television and really ask our kids, "how's life going?" and not accept, "fine...good...or whatever..." as an answer, but force them into real dialogue about feelings, emotions, and behaviors so that we can recognize and help them the way that real humans should.

Hopefully we can raise great children again, great humans.  Because I'm tired of robotic twenty-somethings.  I'm tired of animalistic kids. I'm tired of losers making the headlines.

Because they're hogging the limelight from the majority of other kids people doing really neat things.