What the hell happened?

When I was six years old I knew every inch of the council estate and all the woodland around it. Unsupervised other than by my equally filthy-urchin peers.

The woods are gone now, under more houses. Modern kids cannot come home with a jar of lizards or wellies full of water and tadpoles or covered with so much mud we had to send the dogs in first so our mother would vent her rage on them instead of us (that really happened, my mother still talks about it).

Now? Now you actually get a criminal record if your six-year-old is out of your sight for 45 minutes. I was out of my parents’ sight at that age for most of every day. Now they’d get life for that.

There are those who will not leave a 16-year-old home alone overnight. What? At that age I was off for two weeks holiday with mates (no mobile phones or internet in those days) and when I came home my parents were away on their holiday – I didn’t see them for four weeks. It was not a problem. I recognised them immediately when they came back because I’d known them all my life.

At sixteen you can legally have sex and in nine more months you can join the army and die. Before you can smoke or have a beer.  Does the army want these mummy’s boys? I think not. They will not get through basic training without crying all the water out of their bodies and demanding someone tie their bootlaces for them. They have been brought up to be totally fucking useless.

You used to be able to leave school at 14. The thinking was ‘Well, this one is not going to be an academic, send him off to learn plumbing or something’ and it worked. It worked really well. So well that those plumbers, electricians, plasterers, brickies, were paying into a pension and paying off a mortgage before the rest of us smart arses were out of education. I’m still paying my mortgage. The ‘thickies’ my age who went off to be plumbers etc own their homes and have retired. So who’s the thick one now?

The next generation is going to be tied to Mummy’s apron strings like a lifestyle garotte. They will have no clue how to function as individuals and that’s the idea. They will be dependent on someone else (the state) telling them how to live and what to do next. When they go to university to study tofu-knitting or Sharia bacon-slicing or some other pointless thing that will leave them in debt forever, they will be ripe for control by the useless-idiot academics who still cannot remember who every Socialist revolution shot first.

It beggars belief that serious advice to parents is to guard their child as if every single other person wants to kill it. It is not everyone. It’s just me. Bring them up afraid, dependent and useless. That is the official message now. Do not bring up the next generation of real people. Bring up easily controlled drones.

And they do.

I have lived just over half a century and have raised eyebrows at those telling me how to live who have been doing it half as long as I have. Half a century. Not all that long really. I have, as a child, gone to the corner shop for my father’s cigarettes and bought sweets with the change. It was a good arrangement until the government stopped it.

Now I see the under 18s hiding their cigarettes from me as I pass. Oh, there are a lot of them, even in this little shithole of a town. In Local Shop I am often faced with under-18 staff outside, smoking. Local Shop recruits 16 year olds. Some of them smoke. Why? Because it has been made out to be rebellious by the antismokers. And teenagers are naturally rebellious. I used to be one too. Don’t remember much about it, I was pissed most of the time because it was stil illegal to drink under 18 back then. The ‘rebellious’ point is thus proven.

Is that what the Puritans are so scared of? That left alone, kids might smoke or dink or eat a burger or worst of all – think for themselves? Are they terrified that the new generation might imagine they don’t need to be looked after 24/7 by nanny?

It didn’t take all that long to get here. Getting out of it would take less time if parents were to say ‘Fuck off, these children are mine, not yours’.

I think, however, it will take quite a lot longer than it should.

The current kids are not the first indoctrinated generation. They are the second.