great article from the always-excellent Jim Knipfel in NYPress this week:

they'll murderize ya fer a dollar!

a quote:


Hell, when I was a kid, if there was absolutely no chance that a toy could maim or kill you somehow, that toy wasn't worth shit.

We scraped our knees and elbows, played with matches, tore our clothes, got in horrible fights, played in abandoned factories, broke things, ate cereals with "Sugar" right there in the name, went fishing for carp with bows and arrows, drove our bikes over homemade ramps and dared other kids to do terrible things (which they almost always did).

And we drew awful, violent pictures of people getting shot and hanged and decapitated. By today's standards, we were out there breaking the law on an almost hourly basis.

We turned out okay, some of us. We can deal with misfortunate and pain, and take responsibility for the often stupid things we still do.

Maybe that's why These Damn Kids Today leave me shaking my head and clucking my tongue. At one extreme or the other, they're being legislated away from harmless outlets for some perfectly natural youthful impulses.

The joke of it all is, of course, that if the adults involved in getting those Florida boys arrested think they're bad news now because they drew a mean picture, just wait'll they get out of juvie.