Those Derned Punk Kids of Today

Those derned punk kids of today! They're not like when I was young, back when youth were respectable!

This letter to the editor appeared in the Leesburg Today. Like its author, I think it's about HIGH time we came down hard on this lack-luster, do-nothing generation of youngsters we have today! I mean, Lady Gaga? What kind of name is that for a nice New York City girl??

Hhmmpf! They're all a bunch of punks!

Dirty Dancing
Dear Editor:

I find the current rap scene, music as some call it, that is sweeping the nation to be deeply unsettling. This poetry laced with its degrading, profane rhymes is all that the youth fills their ears with.

With kids questioning their parents as to exactly what a "magic stick" or "disco stick" is and teens singing along to phrases commanding females "to bend over and shake their tail feathers," it is hard to not see the negative impact that these lyrics will have on the innocent minds of the nation's children. Some immediate effects, such as the new style many guys have acquired of not pulling up their pants, have shockingly become completely acceptable even in public places including restaurants and middle schools.

Respectable dances such as the tango or waltz have all but vanished to instead be replaced by absurd dance routines illustrated in rap artists' most recent music videos. These dances, cyclone, pop drop and lock it, and getting low to name a few, involve the same moves that one might view at a strip club. All this atrocious behavior that has originated from the appalling genre of rap causes my stomach to move "like a cyclone."

If nothing is done to put an end to this mind controlling noise that is flooding our nation, I fear that the lives of the younger generation are truly in jeopardy.

S. Shultz, Ashburn
Leesburg Today, Jan. 6, 2010

Or this writer:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their
households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties
at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

Plato, Greece
Socrates, ca. 400 BC
(William L. Patty and Louise S. Johnson, Personality and Adjustment, p. 277, 1953)