My friend Marcelo complains that, when he was in his forties, he had not yet tasted a chicken leg. He tells, with his intelligent irony, that when he was a child he reserved the best slice for his father, that for that he was the one who bent his back to maintain the house. Later, he got confused, crossing the youth between sprees and courtships and by the time he found a son sitting at the table, things had changed so much that children were supplanting their parents and the best slice was for them, for that of growth. Since then, the grandfather sucks the substance of the bug turned into broth, the thighs pass before his nostrils landing on the little boy’s plate and Marcelo continues to suck wings. To make matters worse, the command and chairmanship of the table did not prosper either because the table is round and at school, a psychologist advised arguing with his son for each decision made, not to create a trauma (see tantrum). And he suspects that it was all because he did not find out when the stringer was called thigh, which must have been the crux of everything. A very Marcelo version of a generational change for which others would need to write several treatises.
If we scratch the layer of irony in this story, those grandparents almost in extinction appear, coming from the war with their “that my children do not go hungry”, we move on to the “that we lack nothing” of those children without hunger, but with shortcomings. And from there to the “that they have what I did not have” of the last generation of parents. That “what I did not have” was the border between what was necessary and his frustrated desires turned on his children, turned into roadrunners to get to all kinds of activities (known is the need to master ballet and judo to survive in a neighborhood ) or the compulsive purchase of gadgets with no other function than to cram children’s minds and rooms while depopulation took over the parks where children played after school, exchanged snacks and kicked balls, relieving stress that psychologists now cure . We have designed children in a hurry, teenagers with the best cell phone in the house and young people with a better car than their father, having been listed for forty years.
And here we are, tearing our clothes off before a totally despondent generation that we have instilled in that they have the right to have everything for nothing, without effort and without the need to earn it. Because now modernity dictates that the words responsibility, effort, respect or values smell like mothballs. Thus we have achieved a childish and lazy society in which one party suffers another (minority but too harmful) installed in individualism and self-centeredness even in the midst of a pandemic.
It seems to fall into melancholy to say that any time in the past was better, but it is difficult to accept that the social deterioration we are experiencing is better than the most recent past. It is hard to digest seeing children sneaking into the elevator instead of opening the door to the neighbor who is waiting, people who do not even face you and say hello, young people hunched over the seat of public transport with someone who combs gray hair standing before them. We got away with lightening the children’s backpack so much to avoid weight on their backs. We had to leave the ABCs of education inside and we began to pay the consequences because children spoiled with an unfounded permissibility have begun to degenerate into hedonistic young people and, in the worst of cases, savage.
Design vandalism has been born in which there is no excuse of children dragging abandonment, mistreatment or emotional deficiencies. We are talking about spoiled children, oblivious to everything other than themselves and their right to have fun. Worthy children of those parents who, living in the same country where locked up elderly died, call kidnapping the isolation of their children in comfortable hotels, instead of apologizing for the damage caused and without even thinking about the possible deaths caused.
And the list of achievements of this very permissive and gay society worsens, in which we go from having prisoners for stealing chickens to having vandals roaming the streets, as children with the right to everything grow up and exercise the right to use their primary instincts (which are theirs for that) attacking everything that shakes and does not like. Meek solitary wolves turned into dangerous packs if they group together, capable of killing a young man, in the middle of the street without anyone preventing it. It scares so much hate. It is scary because it is not the result of one cup too many, it comes from within, they have germinated it and they take it everywhere.
Marcelo’s story, which may have seemed funny, is not because we have pushed it to the limit. Perhaps we should return things to their place, that each one plays the role that corresponds to him, the father presides over the table, eats the chicken leg and educates his children. And these, that they learn and obey as we did the others without any trauma and until the chicken has four legs, they have no more rights than their parents.
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