"Adrian Peterson Indicted for Child Abuse" hits the headlines. Details emerge, and it comes out that Peterson was using a switch to discipline his child. While it is unclear whether or not he took the punishment too far, my generation took to freaking out on Peterson, leading to his deactivation from his NFL team. However, my parents were confused by the whole situation, as a switch was a common tool for discipline when they were younger. Nowadays, kids are disciplined much less frequently, and so an event like this seems like a real issue. However, my parents hold little resentment toward their parents for the harsh discipline of the time. As a generation, are we becoming soft?
In a time of participation awards and teams without tryouts, I feel that our generation is losing its fight. Bernie Sanders, the favorite of young people today, advocates for free college. While I know the struggles of college debt very well, it is completely unreasonable to offer this for free. Things can be done to help this issue without taking away all need to work for college. If college were free, students would have no incentive to work in the summer, and the admissions processes at schools would become even more selective.
In the same light, there has been a recent push for a nationwide minimum wage of $15 per hour. Often, minimum wage jobs are taken by young high school students looking for pocket cash, hoping to earn enough for a car or prepare for college. Minimum wage jobs don't require climbing through a company or an industry, and are typically made up of undesirable jobs that require little education to do. Now, these same kids in my generation are asking for more money for these low-level jobs because it is quite likely that they have not had to work for too much throughout their lives.
Many of my peers in this generation have been handed much of what they have throughout their lives, and therefore do not learn to fight or work for what they need. Participation awards and the new "never fail" system in many schools nationwide have taken away our understanding of working for success, and thus, it seems that our generation could be as doomed as many say we are. As people become more and more protected from failure and the pains that the real world holds, success becomes less and less likely for us as we enter into this brutal world. So, if you take anything from this article, I hope it would be a willingness to toughen up, because the world ain't all sunshine and rainbows, like many would lead us to believe nowadays.
