…that would have caused my old Dad’s brow to furrow with amazement:
1.) Bottled water.
“WTF?” Selling ordinary water? In bottles? And charging how much?” That’s not to say he was unfamiliar with the concept — he’d been to France, and after getting the runs from drinking Parisian tap water, he did what the Frogs did and drank Perrier.
But the idea of a society which did have clean and potable water out of the tap (e.g. the U.S. and the U.K.), but still sold bottled water would have been as alien to him as people not being able to drive a stick shift. So:
2.) All auto, all the time.
Back when I were a yoot and my old man was still alive (early 1970s), you couldn’t take your driving test in a car with automatic transmission. Which meant you had to know how to take off on an incline without rolling backwards, as well as being able to row through the gears when parallel parking (another required activity). Once again, he was perfectly comfortable driving his various Mercedes (all auto), he just wouldn’t now be able to understand why almost nobody in the current generation can’t perform so simple an activity. Of course, that’s not all the modern yoot can’t handle:
3.) No manners, no discipline and no beatings.
The lack of manners in today’s society and the indiscipline not just in kids but in everyone would have driven him crazy. Tardiness, ingratitude, disrespect not just for one’s elders but for everyone… all this makes me want to reach for the sjambok. My dad would have been worse. And all this is because children’s (okay, boys’) backsides have somehow become sacred objects that one may no longer use as a disciplinary receptacle for the above whip. As I always say, it’s not the punishment per se but the fear of punishment that keeps youthful psychopaths on the straight and narrow. And all this has disappeared from homes, the schools and the court system because OMG the chiiiiildren! And the children have responded in true Lord Of The Flies fashion, and we are shocked and saddened by all of it because we are morons and can’t understand the root causes of the above.
What a load of bollocks. All of it.
