On Suburbia: A Society of Impotence, Greed, and Naughty Children
Parents, do not raise your children in the suburbs, and if you do, try to stay out of areas that are notorious for their upper-middle class population. Most people tend to believe a cushy, Anglo Saxon town is the right environment for kids to grow up in, and at first glance, the reasoning makes a little sense. After all, well-to-do suburbs make it possible to throw your adorable, little imp into parochial schools of various denominations or guard them from the ever-growing Community of Violence that threatens to weaken our stranglehold on comfortable living. In a suburb, the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts is only five minutes away, and your local grocery store is always having a sale on fresh produce. The suburbs are a haven for coupon-cutters, real estate agents, and flighty spendthrifts. Furthermore, you will never be accosted by a homeless man addicted to isopropyl alcohol nor will you ever have to question the righteousness of your existence by seeing the yellowed eyes of such a person.
Essentially, suburban existence resembles something out of an Aldous Huxley novel – a mass of emotionless bio-machines composed of flesh and blood only faintly resembling human beings. For those of you who having been waiting for a zombie apocalypse [as I have], the time to load your shotguns might well be at hand. Soon enough, I fear the fruits of this societal bastard child will come full circle and begin infecting people of true grit. There will be no survivors. The world will be a hushed desert kept alive only by a quiet hum somewhere in the background.
But I’ve gotten away from the true meat of this thing, and I cannot stress enough my sincerity for the matter: the children. I was raised in the suburbs and have lived there my whole life. My parents, being the well-meaning folks they are, saw nothing wrong with putting me behind the Great Shield and keeping me safely and productively active within a suburban ecosystem. The very problem is that I was, thus, exposed to no hardship save for those petty trials of a confused adolescent tearing his way into manhood amidst a mass of Catholic school girls, which is more or less indicative of anyone who shares my background. [I think, anyway].
If someone wants for nothing, he tends to create woe where there should not be, and furthermore, the misery he does feel shall be expended uselessly on things that make very little difference whatsoever. When the mind of said individual expands enough to realize the absurdity of his existence, compounded by the fact that he has never had to fear or love or distrust, the end result is something comparable to a half-drunk eunuch singing “Whole Lotta Love.” He doesn’t understand the words, and he no longers cares to.
Suburbia is the perfect place to breed irreperable ennui in the heart of your child, and it is the perfect place to make him grow up to be barren – bereft of the Life Force welling up in those who have had to work to achieve. This is a disease we must take very seriously, and to those who have grown accustomed to it, the American Dream is probably the biggest crutch and hindrance to self-actualization that I can imagine.
Do not pay your child’s college tuition or send him to private schools. Do not set up play dates for him, and under no circumstance, should you allow him to grow up believing he is owed anything. Your kid may grow up to be like me, and we certainly don’t want that. If the whole world were a collection of people like me, we would be – as my high school physics teacher used to say – “up the proverbial estuary with no visible means of propulsion.”
The number one reason each subsequent generation is more ungrateful and societally impotent than the prior partially has to do with parents – more specifically, parents who saw promise in those parasitic outcroppings of our nation’s major cities.
