Wandering thoughts…

Things that hit me while I’m trying to shop, and end up thinking about…

Because of the way a lot of people push shopping carts around, I tend to limit my shopping excursions to the quick-hit, get out fast type. In theory, that should mean I can use the express lanes for faster exits. Fat chance.

If I head for a lane clearly marked “10 items or less”, I will find myself behind someone that can’t count, can’t read, or doesn’t care. In most cases I suspect all of those reasons. Regardless, I stand there with my frozen items steadily thawing while Bertha tosses her 250 items onto the counter to get a tally, and then wait a bit more while she counts out her bill in pennies. This sort of stuff gets me thinking, leaves me wondering, and also gets me more than a little pissed off.

Most of all I’m getting increasingly frazzled by the growing “I don’t give a shit about manners, nor do I give a shit about you, I’m the only important person” attitude.

I’m getting the sense that “parents” now are really some sorry asshats, and there’s a growing fear that I – as a parent – was on the tail end of the generation of people that really were “good parents”. Being on the tail end means that I wasn’t the greatest, but I still managed to raise a child that isn’t going to snap and commit some heinous crime.

I read today that some teenager walked into a shopping mall in Utah and just started shooting. The kid ended up dead, so we’ll really never get any insight into why it happened. My thoughts are that the parents should be tried and punished for failure to care about their son.

There is no way that I – as a teenager – could have gotten to the point where I was so psychotic that I would be able to grab firearms and then head into a crowd of people and start thinning the herd. My parents were on top of me as I grew up. They asked what I was doing in school, they wanted to meet my friends, they knew where I was when I went out of the house. If my parents weren’t home when I got there, the neighbors were caring people, and they would have told my folks if I had people over (which was against the rules in most cases). The neighbors knew my parent’s expectations for me, and they helped enforce those rules.

Today I don’t see that. I see parents that are distant, more tied up in their work, and trying to wedge in some “quality time” with their kids, who aren’t stupid – they know Mom or Dad resent having to force interaction. TV, iPods, the internet – all of these things have become electronic babysitters, and the poor kids are cut loose to figure things out, because Mom and Dad think a V-chip or “parental controls” mean they care.

Violent video games, television shows, movies, and music lyrics don’t turn kids into killers. Distant parents do.