Young And Full Of Beans !

'Man must shape his tools lest they shape him' - Anonynomous

This year it's Twitter. Last year it was Facebook. The year before, YouTube. Every day, you hear some technology making headlines and you find a longer list of must-join networks and must-have tools: the iPhone. Cloud storage. Digg. LinkedIn. Kindle. There’s always another social network to join or another tool to learn. Now, I ain't a Luddite but this constant need of attention is making lives soft and lazy. Between Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, it’s just me, me, me. Today’s image-conscious generation comes with a full sense of unwarranted arrogance. To crazy chicks who set up their Myspace page so they can look popular and to mamma’s boys who spend the day updating their Facebook accounts, I don’t want to know what your favorite shows are and I don’t need to know what you’re tweeting about. I don’t care exactly how many hits the video of you singing “Mama Mia” in the shower gets on YouTube and I really don’t want to hear the sickening whine of anyone who thinks of hardship as having to wait two minutes for a microwave to finish. These young, self-centred kids don’t realize there’s work involved. “I deserve this. I deserve that.” What they deserve is get smacked around a little. When I was a kid, I knew my place: down at the bottom and a whole flight of stairs to the top.

A lot of youth these days want to do their own thing, go at their own pace, live life to the fullest. When you think you’ve got a direct line to the top, know all there is to know and never make mistakes, it’s a hard awakening when something doesn’t go your way. New guys at work think they ‘re entitled to greener paychecks. When you’re a fresh-faced kid and you’re starting out, you’re not entitled to anything except a mop and a pail. I was content if some guy dropped me a nickel on his way out the door. If you want a drive a Cadillac, you have to learn to park some first...Perhaps you think of my imagery to be overly dramatic. Do you think guys who take out your garbage have a passion for garbage? No, of course they don't. They do, have a desire to make a honest living. So next time, you're asked to do a job you don't like, tell yourself that this need to be done and you're going to do it. Oh, and stop looking for that heart-pounding excitement over some job and earn pride that you worked hard to get something done. You have to know when you screwed up, and you have to learn from those instances. Got sloppy on a job? Put the decimal in the wrong place? There’s no good that comes from taking the defensive or playing the blame game. Young guys today, it’s never their fault. They’ll be pointing the finger all the way to the unemployment line.

I see guys playing video games all day, flushing greenbacks down the toilet. It makes me sick how some guys can drop a few Gs on PlayStation 3 games but don't give a single buck to charity. I also know of parents who’ve found enough of the white in their kid’s rooms to put some poor kid through college. Oh, and if your son's classmates start calling him Dot and he comes home, bends over and proudly displays a "D" tattooed on one butt cheek and a "T" tattooed on the other, you know it’s about time you had a word with him! Today, any parent handling the prickly points of a teen knows giving the child a positive self-image is important. But do we see to it that we're really driving home the right values? The reason young men and women fly off the handle and make terrible decisions when left to their own devices is because they’ve haven’t been taught anything about their past, their history or their ancestry. They’re so obsessed with their narcissism, they've no sense of right and wrong. Why blame them, blame the parents who failed to discipline them.

Excuse me for being harsh; clearly you're a little offended. Just proves my words ain’t falling on deaf ears. I’d be surprised at how many kids even reflect on their previous actions, responses or decisions. I’m not saying you have to go to the shrink every week and spill your guts, but if there’s one person you can learn from most, it’s yourself. We all need solid advice but can't afford big egos. There are plenty of good things coming out of your generation, but instead of telling you how good you are, I’d rather tell you how better you can be. Perhaps it was the same with me when I was young and my parents would deny and cringe in disbelief at my generation. Wasted potential they say, is a terrible thing. For all I care, you can join that bum on the side walk and scream about socialism and the apocalypse all you want but I wouldn't waste another second on you!