Kids Today

I'm no old man, I'm 24. I'm a kid, too, to many older than me. That said, I had my first real I'm older than some of you other idiots moment last night.

Randomly me and my buddy, along with a group of newly acquainted friends met through another friend, found ourselves at an NYU party, an apartment filled with 25 NYU students having a blast.

"Hey man," said the kid with a Jew fro and straight brimmed cap, "how old are you?"

It was all cool. I had a good time. The kids were nice people - young, but nice. But the thing that I gotta say was really strange and more than a little fucked up was that the entire night the kids played beer pong with water, and just drank beer from a bottle or can when shots were hit.

Un-American. Stupid. Contrary. Dumb. When I asked why they were playing with water every one of them NYU kids said, "We don't want to make a mess."

Huh? Dudes, we're playing on a hard wood floor. There's not going to be a mess. You ever heard of a paper towel? Yeah? You have? Well you can use those to clean it up!

It's what it's come to. Beer pong is no longer what it's meant to be, at least at this party.

I read an article this weekend in the WSJ weekend edition, an interview with David McCullough. The dude is a real inspiration to anyone who thinks or reads, having written the most diesel collection of histories and biographies this side of Bowsell. Aside from the appraisal of McCullough's life and work, it also presented his feelings on the state of young people's grasp of history. The verdict? Not good. No one knows what the fuck has gone on in this country. I believe that; I thought I knew history and then I realized, Not really. I couldn't remember what the war of 1812 was about, and what a Hooverville truly meant.

Young people don't know their history, straight down to how to play beer pong. Yeah, they had a reason - cleanliness - but you have to have a respect for the past, for how it's supposed to be done. Go big or go home. Play it right or don't play at all.

I for one am going to make a point of revisiting our country's past and learn, re-learn, and internalize as much as I can in my spare time. I owe it to those who fought and strived for a better United States. It's a little high flatulent of me to make a claim like this, but the claim is almost the most important thing: recognition of a lack of knowledge about that which should be of the utmost importance.

If you don't know your past you don't know your future, as far as that can go without stretching what we know and can know as humans walking the earth. Play beer with beer pong, because that's the way the game was meant to be played. Yeah, these kids probably knew that, but did they really know? Did they know enough, how much it meant, to play with beer in the cups and drink it down? Shot made, ball in cup, drink it down? They couldn't've known how much it meant to people like me to play like that, to so many of my friends for whom beer pong was a definition of their way of life for four, five, six years.

The connection between Mr. McCullough's concern and my alarm that kids aren't playing beer pong the right way isn't air tight. Hell, it's looser than Andy Dufresne's asshole in Shawshank. But knowing what is right and what is wrong based on what has come before you --- you have to know your history, or else you don't know who you are! You've gotta know what's what and what and when and where you came from. If those kids knew, so be it. Make your own history. But with God as my witness, if they didn't...Well, it don't matter, since I lost to girls that night anways.

One love,

Grgas