I reminisce about the good old days.  I do it often.  Get up on my pulpit and preach about when kids had morals and knew how to work.  I like to refer to myself as “old school”.  I’m not so sure why because in the good old days when I was a kid I spent half my time lying cheating, stealing, and just winning a prize for being all around best pain in the butt. 
I’m sure if we asked my mother she would have a different notion of the good old days when she spent half her time getting me out of scrapes.  She would say and rightly so that Beau is a much kinder child; a much gentler human being; a better and different kind of teen.
At lunch the other day a friend and I pondered the fashion sense of the youth.  Hello do they have any?  I mean it used to be that girls looked like boys and boys looked like boys but now it seems everyone looks like a girl.  Boys wear skinny jeans and fashiony tennis shoes.  I mean it’s downright embarrassing my friend said to be checking some young chick out and realize she’s male and better dressed then your last five girl friends.
It’s easy to pontificate, but in defense of the youth of today I have to say this:
They don’t litter.  Back in the day my friends and I would drop garbage bags full of McDonalds on the side of the road without a second glance. 
We played chicken.  Just plain dumb. 
We didn’t know or care about politics until Ronald Reagan got shot and the we just had a notion that something bad happened but what he stood for was the unknown. 
We did work, but we didn’t volunteer. 
We were not technologically savvy but technology consisted of a phone with a really long curly cord and a Vic 20 and if you were really rich maybe an Atari.  Go get ‘em Pacman.
Kids today are different that’s for sure but they had to change with the times.  The times do not require that they get a job at fifteen.  The times require much more of them at school and in extra curricular activities.  After all, we are the ones pushing them to play basketball, volunteer at the SPCA and become president of the foreign language club.  How much time is left for a part time job?
Our teens have grown up in a much more diverse atmosphere them most of us did and they are better for it and more open and accepting of differences.  In my high school we saw differences and went for the jugular.  I was the leader of that wolf pack.  It wasn’t pretty.  It wasn’t kind.  It wasn’t the good old days always.
So for now I think I’ll get off my pulpit and stop preaching about those days and be grateful for the necessary and important ways in which our teens have come to be teenagers in this 2009.
But skinny jeans …on a dude…I’m just to old school for that.