🚀 go-pugleaf

http://m.chronicle.augusta.com/opinion/editorials/2011-11-
02/rails

It�s an age-old question, but a hopelessly quaint one: What�s 
the matter with kids today?

Historically, the answer has been: not quite as much as adults 
think. It used to be that the question was an overreaction � to 
hair length, to Elvis� hips and such.

Today, however, it�s a very good question with an extremely 
urgent and vexing answer: plenty.

Just a couple of recent examples:

Two 12-year-old boys in New York Sunday dropped a shopping cart 
four stories onto a woman � just for fun. She likely would�ve 
died, if not for a doctor who happened to be nearby. As it is, 
she was in a medically-induced coma early this week.

The woman, identified as Marion Salmon Hedges, was out with her 
14-year-old son buying Halloween candy for underprivileged 
children.

The New York Post reports that the two young suspects were 
laughing and joking as they were led away by police.

Closer to home � literally � a gang of teens and an 11-year-old 
were in custody after a home invasion Sunday in Grovetown in 
which a woman was forced to the floor at gunpoint. Only the 
sound of a man upstairs � reportedly locking and loading a gun � 
inspired the assailants to flee without further mayhem or injury.

Thank goodness the resident was armed. Unfortunately, no weapons 
can protect one from falling objects.

And how utterly perverted that the shopping cart in New York 
managed to find someone on a humanitarian mission.

In Aiken, S.C., a 10-year-old trick-or-treater � playfully 
threatened with having his candy taken � brandished a 9-mm 
handgun at the teaser. He had the ammunition on his person at 
the time. Unbelievable.

In Florida, reports say a 9-year-old girl recently threw a four-
felony tantrum that included spitting on a school bus driver, 
throwing rocks at the bus and tossing a patio chair at a law 
enforcement officer and threatening, in profane terms, to kill 
him. Unbelievable.

In Columbia County, two Greenbrier students have been arrested 
this week in an alleged plot to kill a classmate. Unbelievable.

So back to the question: What�s the matter with kids today?

The answer: with the vast majority, not a thing. But with the 
few, there is seemingly more wrong than ever before. There have 
always been wayward youths, but there�s a sociopathic edge 
present today that is more pronounced and widespread than we 
ever remember. When 12-year-olds are dropping heavy objects on 
innocent passersby for sport and 11-year-olds are participating 
in home invasions, at least one of society�s wheels is 
completely off the rails.

Home invasions are a particularly alarming incarnation of evil � 
even when there�s an acquaintanceship, as there apparently was 
in the Grovetown case. Since this country�s founding, it�s been 
an American birthright to be secure in one�s home. Increasingly, 
that sacred line is being erased by a growingly brazen and 
amoral criminal class.

One has to suspect it�s all due to a great convergence of some 
not-so-great influences: absent and awful reproductive vessels 
parading as parents; an anything-goes culture that not only 
eschews moral values but mocks them; omnipresent entertainment 
media that have no core principles; the God of life being 
replaced by the gods of materialism and indulgence; packs of 
self-absorbed youths who�ve been fed cartons of imitation self-
esteem, and whom adults no longer feel empowered to correct. The 
list goes on.

As long as adults don�t hang together, they�ll hang separately.

Or have shopping carts dropped on them during the commission of 
a good deed.