Calm Down, Grandpa

I recently heard a story on the news concerning two Florida boys, ages nine and 10, who were arrested after it was discovered they'd drawn stick-figure pictures of themselves stabbing and hanging a classmate.

When the pictures were found, the boys were suspended, led from the school in handcuffs and charged with "making a written threat to kill or harm another person"-a felony.

Almost every week, it seems, I hear another story that makes me think, Man, I'm so lucky I'm not a kid now. When I was that age, I drew horrible pictures of classmates, teachers (and others) being shot and stabbed and hanged too. Worse things, even. Most of the kids I knew did. And we did plenty of other things that would've gotten us arrested nowadays. God, just thinking of that arsenal of toy guns I had stashed in my closet-and the variety of other toy (and real) weapons my friends had-it's hard to believe we didn't bring about the apocalypse in 1973.

It's no secret that every generation is convinced, and rightly so, that each generation that follows them is deficient in some way. The kids, they maintain, are nastier, less respectful and/or idealistic, more violent, less intelligent, less self-sufficient and overly pampered. And worst of all, their taste in music blows, if you could call it "music" at all.

It's been this way throughout history, with adults shaking their heads and clucking their tongues at the almost geometric regression of The Young People. And while I do the same thing, that story out of Florida leads me to believe that the adults may be more than a little to blame. Not me, of course, but parents and lawmakers.

Things today seem to go in one of two ways. Either the parents don't give a good goddamn, and their kids end up running around like wild animals, shooting and raping people-or they're insanely overprotective. Traditionally most people are concerned about that first group of parents, but it's that second group (which also includes lawmakers) that worries me more.

I look at parents nowadays-people who are my age and experienced many of the same things I did as a youth, yet who've grown so damned paranoid, so viciously intent on maintaining their children's innocence and protecting them from all the evils of the world, that they're creating a generation of monsters. I mean, we see happy, smiling commercials for V-Chips on the television, yet we react in horror and dismay to learn that American teens think the First Amendment goes too far?

I know a few parents around the country with preadolescent kids-boys in particular-and I'm amazed at the number of them who are dead set against letting their kids experience the same things they did when they were young. I'm not talking about drugs and the like-I'm just saying that they're so insistent on protecting their children that they're robbing them of adventure, of risk, of some very formative events. Like drawing ultraviolent, bloody pictures without fear of being arrested. Or playing with cap guns (though I can understand wanting to avoid that in NYC). Or dealing with bullies. Or hearing some naughty words on the radio.

They outlaw everything that poses even the vaguest threat in a futile attempt to create a hazard-free environment, one in which the element of chance is removed. And in trying to create the illusion of safety and love and peace, they're leaving their children not only with warped perceptions, but vulnerable and helpless whenever the unexpected does arise.

This is not a simple post-Columbine reaction on the part of parents and politicians, either (though that certainly fed it). It started long before that, and the hopeless mania over "security" these past few years has only made it worse. Ultimately it's just a matter of control. "Security" and "control" are synonymous, and equally impossible to achieve, especially if you want to keep saying we live in a free society.

Christ, listen to me. I'm rambling again.

I don't care much for kids. I'll be blunt about that. But the way they're being treated these days-with the outlawed toys and the "kid-proofing" and the censorship of classic cartoons, really started to get to me a few years ago.

See, I've had neighbors who, quite literally, would grab their children off the sidewalk and run them inside or around the corner if they saw me coming. This wasn't because I had ever done anything bad to their kids. I'd never hurt them, yelled at them or threatened them in any way. In fact, the two or three times I had any contact at all with them, I thought I was remarkably well-behaved. But it turns out (I've since learned) I was a bad influence, who always said something incredibly inappropriate whenever the kids were around. You know what I did wrong? I talked to the kids on an adult level, and made a few jokes. And whatever I said during those few brief meetings was enough to set them on that slippery slide toward iniquity. Or terrorism.

I know the world is a very different place from what it was three decades ago. Schoolyard fights didn't end in homicides back then. (The first stabbing at my high school took place the year after I graduated, and no one died.) The Jacks were the only street gang in town, and all they did was ride their bikes around and carry dog chains in their pockets. So far as I know, no matter how much they may have menaced neighborhood kids, they never hurt anyone.

Kids used drugs and drank at an early age, but they always have and always will, wherever you go.

We also had metal lunchboxes (which were invaluable schoolyard weapons). Wrist rockets and jackknives, too. We watched gore-drenched horror movies where the monsters were anything but cute and friendly, and Saturday-morning cartoons in which ducks blew themselves up, cats gulped tranquilizers by the handful, mice drank too much and coyotes actually hit the ground after falling off cliffs.

We had model rocketry kits, and fireworks were readily available, cheap, legal and powerful. If you lost a finger, it was your own damn fault-you didn't immediately start drawing up papers to sue the city because of it.

Hell, when I was a kid, if there was absolutely no chance that a toy could maim or kill you somehow, that toy wasn't worth shit.

We scraped our knees and elbows, played with matches, tore our clothes, got in horrible fights, played in abandoned factories, broke things, ate cereals with "Sugar" right there in the name, went fishing for carp with bows and arrows, drove our bikes over homemade ramps and dared other kids to do terrible things (which they almost always did).

And we drew awful, violent pictures of people getting shot and hanged and decapitated. By today's standards, we were out there breaking the law on an almost hourly basis.

We turned out okay, some of us. We can deal with misfortunate and pain, and take responsibility for the often stupid things we still do.

Maybe that's why These Damn Kids Today leave me shaking my head and clucking my tongue. At one extreme or the other, they're being legislated away from harmless outlets for some perfectly natural youthful impulses.

The joke of it all is, of course, that if the adults involved in getting those Florida boys arrested think they're bad news now because they drew a mean picture, just wait'll they get out of juvie.