Chestnuts Roasting on a Not-So-Well Contained Fire

Let’s talk about the ongoing trend of people failing to grow up shall we?  I’ve been noticing this for a while now.  I thought it was a high school thing.  Everybody knows high school is FULL of drama.  At every turn you never know what is waiting behind the corner just to smack you in the face and then laugh behind your back.  The good thing is, it’s only four years right?  Wrong.  It continues into college.  It even continues into your day to day job as a professional “whatever-you-do”.  It’s the drama that follows constant gossip, rude jokes, continuous flirting, and, in some cases, outright sexism.  Immaturity.  The inability to think about the consequences of what we do BEFORE we do it.  I’ve narrowed the culprit of this growing trend down to the fact that people of this generation have far less responsibility than earlier generations.  We don’t have to remember anything because we have electronic devices to remember for us, they even alert us when we’re about to miss an important date, meeting, birthday, etc.  We don’t have to visit (or going calling on) our family and friends because we can just pick up the phone, or sit down at the computer.  We don’t have the burden of marrying at age 16 and (unless you’re from 19 and Counting) supporting a family of 9 children just so we can have help on the farm.  It starts with a decline in discipline.  Children these days run WILD.  They have no curfews, no bedtimes, no limitations. No EXAMPLE. We’re so scared to physically discipline our children for fear that someone will report it as abuse that we let them run rampant through whatever public venue we happen to be visiting.  Most people these days are having children at such a young age they don’t even know how to train a dog, much less a child, so the responsibility that comes with actually “raising” a child falls backseat to just making sure the kid is eating and still breathing.  With this gradual decrease in responsibility, the age of maturity has definitely gone WAY up. 

Case in point:  My job entails quite a bit of contracted equipment, it requires a fair amount of working alongside contractors. One of these civilians I work with on a regular basis.  To protect the innocent, we’ll call him Ted.  Ted is a married, mid-forties man with two grown children.  Ted also gossips more than a teenage girl running for homecoming queen.  Ted likes to spread hate and discontent wherever he goes and since, at forty-something, with a full time job, the only place you really go is work, you can see what I’m getting at.  Ted has been reprimanded numerous times for sending sarcastic, unprofessional emails, making lewd, suggestive comments, or sheer disrespect for authority.  Ted’s attitude creates so much animosity between the people he works with, that I have had people completely skip talking to him and come straight to me instead, essentially doubling the amount of work that I have to do. 

So here starts the actual rant.  GROW UP!  You are forty plus years old and you are acting like more of a baby than my four year old niece.  High school was so long ago for you that I don’t know how you can still even remember to act that way.  Two-Face was a villain in Batman.  Sexual harassment is NOT something to joke about.  Mean Girls and Bring it On are NOT guide books on how to live your life.  My favorite though?  If you tell me one more time that “women belong in the kitchen” I will personally put my steel-toe boot so hard into your groin, you will be roasting your own “chestnuts” in the heartburn you constantly complain about. Thanks for listening.

Follow @OngoingSarcasm