A diatribe gleaned from the Internet and Email.
When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up, what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning uphill both ways through year-round blizards carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse where they maintained a straight-A average despite their full-time after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death! And I remember promising myself that when I grew up there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of grief like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it.
But!
Here it is, 2003, and I can't help but look aroud and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy. I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a Utopia. And I hate to say it but, you kids today...
YOU DON'T KNOW HOW GOOD YOU'VE GOT IT.
...I mean, when I was a kid, we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves. And there was no email. We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen - and then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in a mailbox...and it would take like a week to get there. And there were no MP3s or Napsters! If you wanted to free music, you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio...but then the stupid DJ would yack, yack, yack all over the begining and mess it all up.
We didn't have fancy stuff like Call Waiting. If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal. And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either. When the the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be someone you hated, your mom checking up on you, someone looking for that thing you borrowed but which you can't find anymore...you just didn't know! You just had to pick up the phone and take your chances.
And we didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation videogames with high-resolution 3-D graphics. We had the Atari 2600 with games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids". And the graphics sucked. Your "guy" was a little square. You had to use your imagination. And there were no multiple levels or screens - just one screen forever. And you could never win! The game just kept getting harder and faster until you died.
When you went to the movie theater, there was no such thing as stadium seating. All the seats were the same height. If a tall guy sat in front of you, too bad for you.
And sure, we had cable television...but back then, there were only like twenty channels and no onscreen menus. You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on. And there was no Cartoon Network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. D'ya hear what I'm saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK, you dirty little brats! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids have got it too easy! You're spoiled! I swear to God, you guys wouldn't last five minutes back in 1984!