"A Matter Of Perspective"
by William Stone III <
[email protected]>
http://www.wrstone.com
Wed Apr 5 16:32:34 UTC 2017
Copyright (c) 1965-2065 William Stone III
-----
I had something of an epiphany regarding the "snowflakes." It's a matter of
perspective. As I've said before, whatever the "snowflakes" are, it's because
their parents (my generation) frakked them up.
Standard disclaimers apply. There are many exceptions. I'm lucky enough to
know a number of them first-hand.
As always, your mileage may vary. I claim no special insight. I simply
happened to be thinking about it when trying to understand their perspective.
I have to imagine a world entirely alien to me.
It's a world that's mostly concrete and artificial. It's a world where all
the playground equipment is made safe by layers of spongy material
everywhere. It's a world where children are drilled to always wear a helmet
and pads when riding a bike.
It's a world where you can only remember one President, whom you were always
told was awesome and special because he was The First Black President. Never
mind that he was utterly incompetent, how would you know? He's the only
President you've ever known.
It's a world where the press drones at you 24x7 from every side. It's a world
where the entertainment is dark and gritty, the music questionable, and all of
it so over-sexualized that it approaches late-night Cinemax soft-core porn.
The real porn is everywhere, available to you from the moment you first typed
the word into Google. You seen everything from hand jobs to gangbangs by age
10.
[ Note: no, I'm not a pervert, I'm a realist. I've seen what's out
there. As a bachelor, the targeted advertising is almost impossible to
avoid, even with my aggressive ad-blockers. The junk that crosses my
screen for women in their forties and fities amazes me. Advertisers know
far too much about us. ]
It's a highly technological world. You've never known anything but computers
and mobile devices and the Internet. Amusement is never more than a fingertap
away.
It's a world in which technology and standard of living is so taken for
granted that many believe the grocery store manufactures food on-site.
I have a very, very hard time imagining that world.
When I was young, I spent a few weeks every summer on my grandparents' cattle
ranch in Very Rural South Dakota. It's probably indescribable to urbanites.
One of my self-imposed missions in life is to do so. It's not the same world.
In my world, playgrounds were over grass or gravel. If you fell, you scraped
your knees.
Nobody wore biking helmets except the BMX guys. I once wiped out on my bike
and tore all the skin off my right palm. I mean ALL the skin. It was endless
fun with my dad picking gravel out of exposed muscular tissue and then
disinfecting it. The pain is probably why I remember it.
Yes, parents did sort kind of first aid rather than going to the ER. They'd
gotten scraped, bruised, and otherwise exposed to life's little problems and
knew that it was no big deal.
As a child, I cut my index finger almost to the bone. My father thought about
stitches and decided they probably couldn't do much better than him.
Disinfect it, use special adhesive strips to keep the two sides together,
dress it, immobilize it, and change until it was healed enough to use.
If you look closely, I still have the scar. To this day, I hold writing
implements oddly, with my index finger extended.
The only time I went to the hospital was when I broke my toe. I did it to
myself in a particularly ludicrous way and was driven to the ER by a play's
director.
At the time, my dad said he wouldn't have bothered and then went on to
describe exactly what they did to me. In retrospect, I agree with him:
there's really no reason to go to the ER. Yank on the toe to make sure it's
set, then wrap it next to the other toes until it heals.
I'd be inclined to do it myself now, except for the social restrictions
invented by my generation.
In my world, politics begins with Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon. I learned
early on that none of these frak-tards can be trusted. Ford, Carter, Reagan
.. all Presidents before I graduated High School.
In my world, the press was something in the newspaper or on the evening TV
news, and that's all. We all knew none of these frak-tards can be trusted.
It's the frakking American Press, the intellectual heirs of William Randolph
Hearst. Of COURSE they can't be trusted.
My formative years involved a technological world. Unlike my parents, I've
never known a world without air conditioning. I've never known a world in
which global communication was impossible -- it's just gotten trivially
inexpensive and much faster.
However, it wasn't the technological wonderland we see today. When I was a
child, today's world would have been nearly-unimaginable science fiction.
[ Everybody owns a tricorder? Yeah, right. Maybe in 200 years. And I
bet everybody will have flying cars and a TV star will be President. ]
I think my generation really frakked-up the next by not allowing them to even
skin their knees when they fell down.
Anyone my age had a new scrape or cut every other day. The number of times I
cut through the neighbor's back yard, through a hedge and over a fence, to
beat my friends home ... the cuts and scrapes I got doing that is a thousand
times what we allowed our kids to have.
I think they grew up too safe, and it's our fault. Unfortunately, there's no
going back. The best we can do is advise our kids to put gravel on the
playgrounds, burn the bike helmets, and keep a good first aid kit handy.
-----
---> The Ludicrous Way I Broke My Toe <---
I was in a stage production of The Emperor's New Clothes in the stand-out role
of Third Guard From The Left. I had about two lines which involved banging
my staff to mimic a loud door knock and announcing that the Emperor was
coming.
You can probably see where this is going.
We were in the middle of dress rehearsal. As usual I was offstage right. As
usual, I brought my concrete-filled staff up for the knock.
Whack! Whack! CRUNCH!!
"The - the Emperor is coming! Dren frak gorrammit dren dren dren .. !"
Jeanette the director made a note: too much noise backstage, watch language.
I hobbled back to the green room and removed my costume tights. My toe just
hung there, unresponsive to my commands to move. One of the other cast
members looked at it.
"Damn, Bill, I think you broke it."
This caused everyone to come look, as they'd never seen a limp toe kind of
dangling there. Someone went to the house to get the AD.
The theater's President was there, observing. He became a little quizzical
when one of the cast members very calmly and quietly asked if the AD could
come back? A few minutes later, the AD returned and very calmly and quietly
asked if Jeanette could come back?
She took one look and said:
"Bill, why does this always happen to you?"
(This was a reference to my having destroyed the box office window in a
similarly ludicrous fashion a few months before.)
At this point, the President was wondering what was going on when Jeanette
very calmly and quietly asked if he could come back?
He was extremely relieved to learn that some teenager had managed to break his
toe. However, he knew the theater might be held liable, so Jeanette drove me
to the the ER.
Once there, they stuck me in a wheelchair ... and then we waited. And waited.
I was young and stupid and got tired of it.
After hobbling in and out of the bathroom a couple of times, I finally decided
that it would be a hell of a lot more fun to roam the halls in my new wheels
than hang around the ER. Nobody there thought my toe was a big deal.
On returning to the ER, I was greeted by a lot of nervous-looking people who
admonished me never to do that again. Apparently my disappearance had caused
something of a panic.
They set my toe, gave me a wooden shoe to brag over when I went to school, and
Jeanette was relieved by my parents' attitude:
"Well, Bill, I guess you should be a little more careful."
-----
--> The Lucicrous Way I Destroyed the Box Office Window <--
I used to spend a lot of time at the theater with a group of like-minded
friends. Sometimes we'd get there before anyone else and the interior doors
were locked.
However, we knew that the adjacent box office had a door leading into the
theater. If you crawled through the box office window, you could get in.
You can probably see where this is going.
After about the five hundredth time of performing this maneuver, my turn came
up. On the way through the window, my shoe got stuck on the opening. I was
already through and gravity is a heartless bitch.
The window shattered into a million pieces. I was lucky it came down outside
the box office or I could've been skewered.
I don't remember what lie we told the theater. I know that it didn't involve
us nonchalantly doing this on a daily basis.
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