Lately, I have been working on some articles that I need to get published. A few of those articles deal with some of the latest incidents involving young kids doing "bad things", young boys in particular.
For a moment there I was about to make the same mistake that many adults do and react to these incidents like "
Oh My God! What is this world coming to?!" "
What's Wrong With Kids These Days?!" However the more I have been researching and writing I don't think these recent occurrences are that much different than any other generation, with the exception that these kids seem to be more creative when it comes to getting in trouble.
Don't get me wrong...I think that there is a problem and something really needs to be done...but it isn't bleak and there is hope...and trust me I know. When I wrote about
Latarian Milton, and how he stole his grandmother's car so he could go do hood rat stuff with a friend, I ended up changing and re-writing it. My first piece was kind of hard on the kid, but I kept feeling convicted as I was writing.
I mean it was easy for me to sit in the comfort of my chair in my home, all grown up (
not) and be judgmental...After all I'm a responsible adult, registered voter, pay my taxes on time and drive the speed limit...but that is now, what about back then when I was a little Latarian, looking for hood rat stuff to do? Well actually I wasn't trying to do hood rat stuff, the only hood rats I knew were the ones that kept trying to burrow in my backyard. Although I wasn't trying to do hood rat stuff, I do remember some of the stupid things I did as a kid...fortunately for me those things never made it to the media back then. I shared a few of those stupid things, in my article,
40 Random (but true) Facts About MMOG37.I mentioned earlier that I think the kids of today are probably more creative when it comes to finding trouble to get into, and I am willing to bet that this is mostly due to the kinds of images they are exposed to like movies, videos and video games.
Unlike Latarian and today's kids, we didn't have to worry about the negative influences of video games like Grand Theft Auto, no we were safe watching things like Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry. In fact we loved Bugs Bunny so much that we often paid homage to him in our daily activities, like the time when my little brother, who was tired of being picked on took a coal shovel to the back of the head of another brother...it was kind of disappointing not to see the little stars or birdies floating around his head...thinking that maybe he didn't hit him hard enough he took another whack at it...
BANG! still no stars or birdies...oh well that myth was busted.
Then there was the time we wanted to test the theory of the traveling flame. Bugs Bunny was always blowing someone or something up...it was amazing to watch him leave a trail of gunpowder and then light it and watch the sparks travel along the trail he had left, then reach it's destination, blowing up his intended victim. We looked everywhere but we could never seem to find any gunpowder...so we settled for the next best thing...gasoline.
We decided to conduct a few experiments, we selected one of the garbage cans, poured some gas into it, and then made a trail of gas a safe distance away, and then lit it. Nothing happened, so we started back at the beginning and added some more gas to the garbage can and re-poured the gas on the trail. We tried to light it again and still nothing happened.
We figured out that since the trail was so long, the gas on the trail was drying up before we could get a chance to set it on fire, so we came up with a solution, the trail became a trench, we dug the trench several inches deep, so that we could pour enough gas into it to give us time to be able to light it before it dried up.
It took us a few minutes, but once we were done we couldn't wait, we anxiously poured some more gas into the trash can and even more into the trench. We were now ready to test our theory. We hid behind a tree as we prepared to light the trail...we lit a match, tossed it into the gasoline trench and success!
The flame traveled quickly along the long trench we had built, we braced ourselves in preparation for a big explosion as the flames raced toward the garbage can, and once reaching the garbage can, the flames raced up the side. The flames appeared to go down inside the garbage can and just when we we ready to hear a loud bang...Nothing! Nothing at all! Nothing happened...we paused, waited a few moments...still nothing...not a single sound.
We waited for what seemed like a really long time and it appeared that nothing at all was going to happen. Figuring that our plan failed we decided to go and investigate.
We walked slowly toward the garbage can, I keep calling it a garbage can, but it was more like a fifty gallon barrel, we had to stand on a crate to look inside of it. My brothers and I were all perched on tops of buckets and crates, peering down inside a potentially loaded barrel. We began moving things around inside the garbage can, we could smell smoke, and even saw what appeared to be a little trail of smoke coming up from the middle of the garbage can.
Just as each of us had our little heads stuck inside that barrel, we reached down to grab a smoking piece of cardboard, and just as we lifted it up...we heard and felt a loud bang and flame like that of the exhaust from a jet plane came rushing past all of our faces!
The heat was intense but lasted a second, the blast knocked all of us backward off of our little perches. After the ringing stopped and we weren't dizzy anymore we managed to get up and checked to see if we were all okay...after passing the finger and facial feature checks, we returned to the scene of the crime to figure out what just happened.
As it turns out, every time we poured gas into the trash can, (which actually had trash in it by the way,) the gas was trickling down into the bottom of the trash can and collecting inside a jar. When we lit the gas trench, the flame did make it inside the garbage can, but the trash was packed so tight that the initial flame was smothered, leaving only a few smoldering pieces of cardboard in the middle of the garbage can, when we began lifting things up out of the garbage can, the oxygen in the air ignited the flames which then reached the fumes from the gas collected in the jar at the bottom and WHOOSH! there you have it...an instant
Pillar of Fire!Fortunately, for us the extent our injuries were, the loss of our eyebrows, the tips of our afros singed and turned grey and minor burns on our faces causing them to feel extremely tight and shiny. The real injuries, however, came after my dad came home, as this was back in those days when a parent could still measure out a dose "butt whipping" without worrying about going to jail...and although as a kid I was against it...I have to admit in that case we really needed it...who knows what other kinds of stuff we would have been trying to blow up.
These days the closest I come to trouble is when I tell my own children of the bad things I did as a kid. Most of the time they think that I am making this stuff up to amuse them...until their grandmother confirms that I actually did those things.
I share those stories with my children for several reasons. One of those reasons is because I want them to know that I don't just make arbitrary rules for the sake of making them...I make them because I have been there and I know the kinds of trouble kids can find to get into...especially when they have a lot of idle time, no direction and no one there to tell them where the line is and when they are crossing it.
Looking back at my own experiences, there is one conclusion I have come to, regardless of generation or even culture and ethnicity; kids and trouble are like strong magnets being attracted and pulled toward each other, the more distance and/or obstacles you put between the two of them...the lesser the pull will be.
Ironically you can also cause a magnet to lose it's magnetic properties by banging it with a hammer...however it is not recommended that you try this with kids as it could be very messy and earn you a vacation in prison. What I do recommend is that you put as many things as you can between kids and trouble, especially when dealing with boys.
Keep em busy, give them some sort of creative outlet, but most of all spend some time with them even if it's only a little bit..and lastly don't be a superhero...enlist the help of friends and family or people who also want to see your children do well, to help serve as that cushion between your kids and trouble.
...but you don't have to pay any attention to me...I was just thinking.
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