If you’re under 30, you’re probably a nitwit.

Wordspinner wrote two entries a while back: "The Infantizing of America" and: "TDIB". I completely agree with him and am outraged by pretty much everyone I see. Where to start?

I’ve read that the average person spends four hours a day on the phone. (This I’m sure includes texting as well as actual phone conversations). I spend less than an hour a week on the phone. What in the world do people have to say for four hours a day? Unless, of course, your job involves being on the telephone. Most people I know have the most inane conversations ever. Though not merely on the phone, but in general, people do not have real conversations. It was said that "[morally] Poor people talk about other people, common people talk about things, while extraordinary people talk about concepts." I rarely see people that talk about ideas or concepts. Everything is always about what other people have or do. As a matter of fact, one person I know actively avoids those conversations and when one comes up he leaves the room, turns up music, or tells the participants to "shut up."

All of this comes chiefly from the misuse of the Internet. Even e-mail, which is a great concept, destroyed the art of letter writing. Very few write long e-mails (more than a paragraph long), and most that I’ve seen are a single sentence. "I haven’t heard from you in a while, what’s up?" Even beyond that "instant messaging" programs completely killed even what e-mail promised. Very few people e-mail any more, and if they do it’s to set up another form of communication.  This is confounded even further by "social networking sites."

These are one of the things that annoy me most about society today.  It all started with Myspace.  And everyone has hundreds of "friends" of whom they don’t actually know, and communicate via leaving brief messages and stupid pictures on their page.  Then came facebook, which is the same thing as Myspace.  Oh, but it’s "better."  No, it’s exactly the same.  It degrades the essence of society by changing what a "friend" is and how we meet people.  Admitted, I have both a Myspace and Facebook, though I have a grand total of 9 friends on Facebook–all of whom are actually my friends, and close to 30 on Myspace–again all of whom were good friends.  Then came the most confounding thing I’ve ever seen on the Internet ever:  Twitter.  What.  In.  The.  World.  Firstly all it is is status updates, which both Myspace and Facebook have.  Secondly as with the status updates on all three of those sites, who cares?  I don’t care.  No one cares.  If you care you are part of the world that has the attention span of a gnat and needs all your information in tiny bite-sized formats.

Look at news networks, everything is ticker-ized and news blips, all the information we get is pared down to the smallest amount of information that could possibly be conveyed in a single sentence.  And that’s what we want and need.  And yet, this information is written for people of lower intelligence and a third grade vocabulary.

Television in general is this way, nothing but violence and sex all at a teenage level.  Channels such as The Learning Channel and Discovery have gone downhill in providing shows such as "Survivor Man," and "Man Versus Wild" which teach us how to "survive" in the wild if we ever had to.  Yet, very few people watch the show for that reason and instead watch it because it’s entertaining.  The History Channel has their Monsterquest show that teaches us nothing, and all these so-called "reality" television shows all decay the mind of America specifically.

The average teenager reads for less than ten minutes a day.  I spend no less than an hour a day reading, why is it that so many people don’t read?  I’ve gotten varied answers including it is boring, it "hurts" their eyes, and may other things.  In this society where every book is, or will be, a movie why read it when you can just watch it with special effects?  Even comic books–no one reads them any more because they all are movies now.  Why read them when you can not use your imagination?  Everything in today’s society is designed to beat out imagination, free thinking, and learning.

This stems from the education system in general.  Children don’t learn anything, they are trained to pass exams.  I was one of the last generations to avoid this fate (my generation was used to set the bar for the FCAT).  Why read a book when you can just get the wiki-article on the book and it’s enough to pass whatever test.  The grading scale has also catered to moronic activity.  A 94% was an A-, and 85% was a B-, I don’t remember what the benchmarks for the other letter grades, though I know now that a 90% is now an A- and an 80% is a B- causing at least a 4% increase in GPA and letter-score grading.  This is also coupled with the generally apathetic teaching that is done in most schools as well as the "no child left behind" program that forces teachers to cater to the lowest standard instead of setting the highest standard of learning and letting children fail.

I remember when my answers were exposed as wrong and the teacher seemed to condemn my thought process it made it a challenge and goal to show that teacher "who was boss."  Fear of failure made me want to achieve greatness.  If there is no possibility of failure why want to do any better than what you have to?  Why try and be better when "average" is the new "great?"  I knew a student who actually thought that Abraham Lincoln was the first president.  She wasn’t a stupid person, merely uneducated and devoid of the desire to learn from teachers devoid of desire to teach.  It’s not the teachers fault really, it’s the school-board and politics that produce these "benchmarks."

Then we come to less mental aspects of why society annoys me–clothing.  The problem with all these "subcultures" is that they have a style of dress which forces them to conform when people go to subcultures due to not wanting to conform.  These uniforms are idiotic in their attempt to state individuality.  People say that they "like the way they dress."  Do they realize how stupid they look with their tight jeans and black hair with too much gel in it?  (I’m talking about the guys.)  It’s no different than the standard "punk," "hippy," or "goth" uniforms.  Like it or not, you all look the same, and you all look stupid.  Then, they get bent out of shape when people refuse to take them seriously, how can someone take you seriously when you can’t take yourself seriously and refuse to ta

ke anyone not of your clique seriously?  As parents we let these types of actions occur for far longer than they should, if a child can’t get a job because they look like morons and complain as to why they can’t get a job the parents should step in and give an ultimatum.  Get a job, or get out.  My father actually locked me out of the house for eight hours a day until I came back with a job (at the tender age of 14).  Within two days of one-hundred degree weather I found a job.  Non-conformity does not equal socially destructive behavior.  If you want to be rebellious and not have a job, more power to you, but don’t do it off of the well-meaning of parents.

That’s not to say that only these "sub-cultures" annoy me with their garb, but also this tucking of the pants into boots.  Do these girls realize what it looks like?  No, instead they see this as normal.  I don’t understand why it’s done and as best as I can figure it’s done to show off the boots–between that and the fact that pants are now so tight that it’s physically impossible to tuck the boots under the pants.  Do these women think that they are Jack Burton?

All in all society is doomed and it can only be said that those that don’t fall into any of these categories of fell pray to any of the pratfalls you are a minority.  You are floating in a sea of morons who are self-obsessed, intellectually lazy, and addicted to technology that does nothing to advance humanity.