I won’t hold no truck with any of this rude bunch, these kids today. No, I may not keep up with technology or current events or the supreme edicts of the inhuman god-emperors, but I stand by the idea that people of my generation were just plain more courteous, and had a modicum of common sense, to boot, which you won’t find one whit of in today’s crowd, I’ll have you know.
They say nostalgia is all make-believe, that maybe I’m seeing the past in rose-tinted spectacles and imagining a better time, but that’s just a load of hogwash—I know damn well what I lived through, and no amount of ‘pokes’ or ‘thumbs’ or ‘uppers’ on your blasted electronic mails or your twits on your web logs will make me think any different. And that’s not just because my cortex has been wiped and impressed so many times by the propaganda machines that I no longer can have any remote assurance that my identity is my own.
Back when I was a kid, damn it, we played outside, and used our own imaginations, unlike today, when the sky has been scorched by the flying metal reapers and nature is but a memory. We didn’t have any of these fancy, newfangled beeping contraptions, Game-Box or Cube-Boy or what-have-you, nosiree bob, we made do with wooden blocks and the knowledge that our souls were our own and unsullied, not to be ripped from our twitching forms and devoured by unholy simulacra of sacred life.
An education then was a real education, you bet your life it was. They taught us Latin and Greek, gave us a firm grounding in good, old-fashioned classic literature and weren’t too afraid or sissy to beat some discipline into us once in a while. You try anything sensible like that these days and you’re liable to get sued by some upstart twelve-year-old doesn’t know how to roll with a punch. Or executed without trial by the decapitation drones.
I can hardly believe the schools these days, poisoning our children’s minds with their treasonous and unpatriotic history. Schoolhouse Rock never called Columbus an idiot or a genocide! When I was growing up, the man was a hero! He damn well discovered this country, didn’t he? It’s not like he’s done anything in the interim to merit this; he’s dead, fer krisakes! Not to mention their artsy-fartsy ‘music classes’ turning them all into d*mned hippies and their and their ‘sex-ed’ hammering smut down our children’s gullets and their mandatory neuro-positronic indoctrination regimes brainwashing them for the good of the überstate. Honestly: darn whippersnappers, consarn them.
Anyway, we learned hard facts and could name the state capitals. Ain’t never seen no punk teenager these days who could do as much, and that’s not just because all the cities have been firebombed by the Rogue Intelligence and the populations relegated to the labor camps and barbaric desert settlements, the few starving survivors wandering the harsh and lifeless earth to avoid being tortured to a slow death by the satanic and otherworldly invaders that stole our humanity as they raped our species and its history, religions, and ideals.
Call me old-fashioned, but that’s just the way it was.
————
Daniel Galef’s humor writing has appeared in The American Bystander, Kugelmass, Clever Magazine, The Weekly Humorist, and The Journal of Irreproducible Results. He has also published fiction, poetry, song parodies, sketch comedy, crossword puzzles, science columns, academic papers, microfiction, book reviews, comic strips, and a musical play. Current status: kinda tired.