Kids Today

George Carlin on KIDS TODAY

I know this sounds like old-fart talk, but I think kids today are too soft. They have to wear plastic helmets for every outdoor activity but jacking off. Toy safety, car seats, fire-resistant pajamas. Shit! Soft, baby boomer parents, with their cult of the child, are raising a crop of soft, fruity kids.

Here's another example of how parents are training their children to be weak. Did you ever notice that every time some guy with an AK-47 shows up in a schoolyard and kills three or four students and a couple of teachers, the next day the school is overrun with psychologists, psychiatrists, grief councelors, and trama therapists trying to help the children cope? Shit! When I was a kid, if somebody came to our school and killed three or four of us, we went right on with our work. We finished our arithmetic. "Thirty-five classmates, minus four equals thirty-one!" We were tough! I say if a kid can handle the violence in his home, he oughta be able to handle the violence in school.

What bothers me most is all this mindless, middlebrow bullshit about children being "our future." So, what's new? Children have always, technically, represented our future. But what does that mean? What is so important about knowing that children are our future? Life as it is right now - today's reality in this country - the people lying on the streets and park benches, living in the dysfunctional homes, the prisons, and the mental institutions, the addicts and drunks and neurotic shoppers, these people were all once children described as "our future." So, this is it, folks. This is what the system produces. The adults you see today are what kids become. Is anything really going to make it any different? To me, they're just another crop of kids waiting to become wage slaves and good little consumers. You know what I see when I look at today's kids? Tomorrow's fucked-up adults.