Personally, I blame coffee table bumpers. You know, those curved pieces of foam you’re supposed to wrap around the edges of your coffee table as soon as your baby starts to walk, so that when they fall down they don’t gash their little heads open on the sharp edges? Yeah, those things. An entire generation has been raised with coffee table bumpers, which means that an entire generation has gone through their toddling years almost completely free from blunt force head trauma.
On the surface, of course, this sounds like a good thing. But then again, human history is rife with ideas that sounded good at the time, only to turn out, in the end, to be not quite so brilliant after all. Take dynamite, for example. Or kudzu. Or the Jonas Brothers.
Coffee table bumpers, I believe, fall into the same category. Why? Because somehow, by preventing that first blow to the forehead, they also prevent the necessary formation of common sense. How does this work? I have no idea: maybe the on/off switch for common sense is located in the frontal lobe. In any case, I’ve thought long and hard about possible explanations for the lack of common sense in the current generation of children, and that’s the best I’ve been able to come up with so far.
Coffee table bumpers.
I know, I know: it isn’t like me to make sweeping generalizations about this or any other generation; my usual take is that people—and children—have been the same since the dawn of time. Cave mothers were probably complaining about having to pick saber-tooth tiger skins up from off of the cave floor, and Roman Centurion fathers were probably coming home from a long campaign of decimating the Visigoths, only to freak out when they see what the kids have started wearing back home. And don’t forget about the shock and disgust that went through the 19th century Viennese community when kids started doing that crazy immoral dance called the waltz.
But I don’t know. I think there really might be something to my suspicion that the current generation is seriously lacking in the “common sense” department. I mean, I know a boy who is within 18 months of having the right to vote, yet who still firmly believes that he will be the proud owner of a tiger someday. A tiger. (And no—he doesn’t plan on joining the circus. Or Siegfried and Roy).
He can’t be reasoned out of this belief, either. When you point out to him the cost, the inconvenience, and the danger, he ignores you. Even when you point out that this arrangement would, in all likelihood, not be enjoyable for the tiger, he hears nothing. All he says is that it’s his dream, and he plans on pursuing his dream. “Aim for the moon,” he says. “At least then, when you miss, you’re still in the stars.”
I want to point out that, technically, if you aim for the moon and miss you’re left floating in the vacuum of space. And also that it would take you hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years to float on over to the nearest star, unless you floated over to our star, the Sun, in which case you would die a fiery painful death. And then I’d like to point out that even if you did manage to land on the moon, there’s be no oxygen to breathe, so you and your tiger would last about two minutes (maybe longer for the tiger, actually).
I want to to point all of this out to him, but then again, I don’t want to hurt his feelings. I know I’m not doing him any favors, but for some reason I just can’t set him straight.
Sigh. Stupid coffee table bumpers.