The current generation, the one that now ranges from diaperhood to college, including some who are probably still wearing diapers in college, are all a bunch of coddled little wusses who are going to become the most disgusting, most entitled, most misguided critters that America has ever seen. They are going to kill us all. The current adult generation, those born in the '60s and '70s, well, we grew up before seatbelt laws—the first came in 1984—before car seats, and back when nursing mothers were prescribed drugs that you'd kill to be able to get today if you were desperate to get off your face. The vast majority of us grew up in giant gas guzzlers in which our parents smoked with the windows all the way up, and when the cars crashed, which they very nearly always did, we just bounced around inside.
Sometimes when we actually went to the emergency rooms, they just patched us up and sent us back into the game. Also people had a lot more children and they didn't work so hard on giving them precious fucking names so that when they lost a kid, they had EXTRA kids to fall back on. In some of the places I grew up, the children played with tarantulas for fun (you pour water in one of their little holes in the ground and the spiders pop all sleepy out of their nest's back door) and drove heavy threshing machinery after school. We drank at night with our parents, at the age of 11 or 12, and we drove long before we were 16. The Boomer generation was, by and large, too busy finding themselves anyway, or too busy keeping their head above water financially, or too busy getting in and out of EST and hot tubs and divorce court, to pay the kids any mind, and so the generation largely raised itself—with pretty decent results, except for one thing: The current crop of nightmare urban parents.