Call me what you will: I'm a product of my parents

I'm told, by many people older than me, that I am mature, intelligent, and responsible for my age. I sound conceited when I say this but quite frankly it's true. I'm a pretty good student, and the way I was raised made it so that I find it easier to talk to people twice my age rather than my peers. I am guilty of staring at people in the lunch room and going "My God, won't they just grow up?" to some of my closer friends around me. Unsuprisingly enough, it's generally directed to the second-semester senior boys who find the fact that they just threw mashed potatoes half way across the room...again...to hit that preppy chick who squeals like a pig when something goes wrong is the funniest thing ever to happen--ever. Srsly.

But there's a raw nerve that's rubbed when I hear adults sneering about "young people" these days. I understand my generation is apathetic. We're lazy. We like our material goods more than anything else. I've listened to a girl in one of my classes go on about her brand new pink IPod with video etc etc etc and she's the only person she knows that has it and isn't that special for about two days now. We're not exactly the brightest bulbs in the box, and we love celebrities and their drama and their glamour.

My generation is sort of a crap generation. Teenagers generally are pretty crap no matter what generation, but my generation does seem to take it to the next extreme.

And yet, it's all our fault. If I were to get into an accident (like I nearly did today), even if it wasn't necessarily my fault (which it wouldn't have been had it happened), I'd be the one to get looked down upon. If I slip up a bit at a fancy restraunt, I get glared at. If I don't understand something that I probably should, I get sighed at. I love politics, yet I don't pay much attention during the school year (and you have no clue how much that is killing me right now) because I'm busy. But if I'm ignorant to what Hillary Clinton just said last night I'm witness to a thinning of the lips and a gentle hum. I can see the "Teenagers just don't care at all about these things" running across their eyes.

Whatever me or my friends do, it's our fault. Our fault for watching violent TV, playing violent video games, being violent. Our fault for high teen pregnancy rates, because we're the ones suffering the dreaded hormones. Our fault we're apathetic and don't know anything.

But...how much of it is our fault? How much of that can you truly blame on one person, and how much of that needs to go to the parents?

I'm not saying that you should blame the parents of a kid who shoots up his school (though they could've paid more attention to their kid). I'm not saying you need to blame the parents when a kid just doesn't recycle that coke can of his, but I am saying that maybe it's not just my generation that's so bad here.

I see a million brilliant minds every day when I go to school--and I'm not just blowing steam. I have friends who, with a bit of motivation, can do just about anything.

But they need that motivation. They need to apply themselves and there would be no stopping them. We could move mountains, if we wanted to.

But we can't, so it won't happen. A lot of the kids I knew grew up with the television as their baby sitter because mom and dad just frankly weren't sure what to do, or were too busy. They watched some pretty violent shows, played some pretty violent games, and now they're violent, and mom and dad never took the time to glance at the television and say "No."

Dinner for me usually includes sitting down at the table, with the news on, and discussing the issues with my mom during the commericial breaks, weather, or traffic. Lately that's lead to passionate debates over politcal views that will leave both of us seething in anger for a few hours before we can talk about anything again.

I'm lucky. A lot of my friends are lucky if they're parents talk to them about anything more than "Why are you failing this class?"

Parents don't seem to get kids interested in the world around them, and there's very little around to prompt us to do that ourselves.

I'm not saying let's turn the attention from the kids and start ragging on the parents, but let's try and balance this out a bit, yeah? After all, I know some of my driving habits come from years of watching my mom speed like a demon (and though my car used to be her's, it's still fairly new and can get pretty high up there without a single problem--not that I'd, y'know, have...that much experience or anything...ahem), but I know it's not right. And I know I need to slow down--just because I use my blinkers unlike half the idiots out there does not mean I can speed. By this point, I'm too blame for that. But when I watch the five year old down the street beat up some other little kid with stuff he learned from some cartoon or another, well...it doesn't inspire me with much hope for my future.

A lot of people might say "Well, you know the government's doing this to help parents and that to fix this problem and censorship" and so on and so forth--but think about it. Has our society really digressed so much that we need our government to raise our kids for us?

And either way, while it might take a village to raise a child--there's only so much a village can do when the kids own parents won't look at him twice.

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