I'm not my Stinking khaki's

Is it me? Or does our society celebrate being "young" wayyyy too much? And we don't celebrate being old at all. To me, this freaking sucks because we're having fewer children, and living longer.

WTF?

If you look around the world today, watch the TV, listen to the music, eat the food, shop in the stores, you're going to see nearly everything is marketed to youth.

What is so great about being young? I can understand the nostalgia of blissful ignorance when my world, quite litterally, ended past the corner of 19th street and was naught but a vision outside the windows of my family's caravan. But now that I think about it, I wish I had better understood my world. I would have talked to my grandfather and not worried so much about the new Lindsay Lohan album or NES. I would have spent more time with the nerdy girl who loved the "real me" in high school and less with the one that only wanted me for a trophy. Cause we KNOW which gained the freshman 50 and which one is currently curing cancer.

Yeah, I'm the trophy, Myles.

Call me a fan of a Liberal Arts Education, but young kids are called young kids for a reason. They're dumb. They're stupid. They don't even know enough of the world to know they know nothing of the world.

If you don't have any money in this world, then you really have no power. This is a basic truth. But there's another side to that coin. If you don't have any money, then you can't do any harm, either. I read all the time that the reason for this marketing towards youth and teenagers is because A) they are dumb enough to fall for billboards, snappy ads and Carson Daly and B) they are the ones with the skyrocketing disposible income. Income? Income? Since when did a 3-6 after school job count as income?

Parents, don't give your kids money.

What is happening now in America is making me sick. Cause it turns out that teenagers aren't the only ones falling for the propaganda that tells them they're the best and that High School is the best time of their lives. It turns out that we really all think Laguna Beach is bitchin'.

I don't want to be a teenager, but damn, they can do whatever they want. They're free to drink and screw and do... -under the safety net of daddy's tax shelter. Surprisingly warm there. And Dr. Spock has a generation of kids who don't know the sweet perspective of pain past having to settle for the green Dodge as opposed to the red VW.

I cry.

How do we fix things? Well there are a lot of clever ways. For instance, we can let every shitty Ashlee Simpson/Usher/Hillary Duff movie be just a smidge more realistic. They can look immature, and stupid, as they should. Ashlee doesn't get her own apartment at the age of 17. Usher has someone not take a check he tries to write because the check number is below #50. And Hillary Duff has a really bad case of Cramps, realizes that a mediocre voice really can't win some fella's heart and that trying some stupid scheme to do something sweet for someone else doesn't turn out for the best, has serious consequences and people are really hurt.

Oh, and they could also put real teenagers in the roles played by teenagers. THAT would help a lot. Chad Michael Murray is 32 years old. I swear to God.

Whatever. I need sleep. I'm out of soap anyway.