Back in the Day

The Korner brings you something new today, as we often do. We bring you a kautionary rant from K. Hume O'Henderbaum, a man far more advanced in years than any of our regular kontributors. This chronologically challenged being has a good message that we at the Korner have no qualms endorsing. Barring no holds, Mr. O'Henderbaum calls out the youth of our day and age and all the decadent excess they represent. All in all, we're pretty proud to bring his perspective to our forum. As the reader, we urge you to humor this geriatric as we have and discover that there is more to him than Werther's Originals and Matlock. He's actually pretty sharp for an old guy. Receive:

Those were honest times back in my day. Simple times. Honest and simple. That is, relative to the world these days. Certainly things weren’t entirely simple. It’s not like we were shamelessly running around naked, banging rocks together and painting rudimentary game herds on the walls of French caves. We had cars, clothes, cloths, curtains, coils of many kinds and other items beginning with other letters of the alphabet—which reminds me: we had the alphabet, too, to dispel a popular myth. We even had a song that made the alphabet easy to remember. We taught it to kids. It made them smart. The only exposure kids have to the alphabet these days is on their iPods or, to a lesser extent, Zunes.
But times change. Things become more complicated, less honest. But let me tell you: oh, how we had relative simplicity and honesty back then. You couldn’t walk ten feet without someone or something manifesting the simplicity and honesty of the times right before your eyes. Sure, we didn’t have all of today’s standard necessities like face transplants and devoted quesadilla appliances, but we had enough. We had each other. Folks had manners back then: we'd address elders as “sir” or “ma’am” depending on their gender. Men held doors for women expecting very little in return. So maybe our simple ways reinforced harmful stereotypes of women being feeble, incompetent, and needy, but at least we were honest about our chauvinism. Ask any man from back then, and he’ll use any or all three of those aforementioned adjectives to describe women as a whole.
Any more, it seems kids these days don’t care for wisdom unless it comes in the form of an Xbox coated in fast food eatery special sauce and bits of High School Musical memorabilia. They want to do things the way they want. They want to re-invent the wheel. But guess what, we had a wheel in my day and it wasn’t half bad. In fact, it was nearly round. Maybe we didn’t have the sophisticated twenty-first century technology and vocabulary to recognize what type of geometric shape our wheel was, but we were proud of it. We were proud of ourselves. We were all hardworking, upstanding, honorable citizens, scholars, and athletes back in those days. Hopefully the kids of today will wake up and start acknowledging the wisdom of the past before they fully succumb to the wiles of Soldier Boy promises and text message cunning.