Welcome Class!

Dear Internet Users,

Look I get it, for a long-time people didn’t have an outlet to air their grievances and what not and along comes the internet. We finally have an easy outlet for spreading the word around the world that we still need reminders not to leave dogs in hot cars or that Ivanka Trump’s clothing line isn’t made in the good old USA. I’m constantly being tagged, shared with and notified of all the latest kitchen hacks, ways to save the environment and prevent cruelty to animals. I love that we all have that information at our fingertips now. It has made us better people. We now can collectively realize that maybe the way things have been done isn’t necessarily the right way to do them.

Look, America is a great place, you have a ton of freedoms to let your freak flag fly high and proud. Yeah, we did some really horrible and disgusting things in the past, slavery, not letting women vote and the like. Yeah, we were straight up assholes. The reason for this, though, is ignorance. They didn’t know any better and they sure as hell didn’t have a way or the time to find out that what they were doing was wrong. They had fields to plow, kids to feed and raise and they were doing that in the days of no fast food. They actually had to make their clothes themselves, and they had to take a 10-hour buggy ride into town to see the doctor. They didn’t have the time to stop and think things through like we do now. So, instead of instead of dwelling on how awful that was, let’s sift through, pull out the lessons we learned and move forward.

This brings me to the younger folks. You have the luxury of too much time on your hands. It no longer takes you 4 hours to cook dinner, you no longer must change your own oil in your car and you can pay the neighbor's kid to mow your lawn. So, you have all the time in the world to turn things over in your heads over and over again and work yourselves up in to a frothy frenzy. You are very good at nitpicking and making mountains out of molehills. Sadly, most of the things that you scream at the top of your lungs about are things the older folks don’t even understand. It equates to a screaming toddler pissed off because you didn’t know which episode of Paw Patrol they rescued Farmer Yumi’s cow on. Which brings me to another point. PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN AND WATCH PAW PATROL WITH YOUR KIDS. Yes, I dread watching Peppa Pig on repeat too, it’s like nails on a goddamn chalkboard, but that is what you signed up for when you had kids. You signed up to make them better kids, and the first step is to PAY ATTENTION TO THEM.

This brings me to the older folks. You had the luxury and the freedom to let your kids wander and explore the world safely. This gave you time to do the things you needed to do like mow the lawn, do the laundry, etc. We were free and safe to figure out that you shouldn’t ride your bike at 90mph down a hill and if you did and you wiped out and broke your arm, you were free to take your kid into the doctor to get it fixed. It didn’t cost you an arm and a leg and you didn’t have to fill out a form from Child Protective Services as to why your 8-year old was left unsupervised for 7 hours. And to rub salt in the wound, now that a lot of your generation has retired and finally has some well-deserved time off, you all tend to be too nosy and rat us out for doing things that only seem dangerous. At a gas station once, there was a 70ish year old lady hollering at the top of her lungs that there was, “A BABY DYING IN THE CAR IN THE HEAT!!!!” As I poked my head up from the other side of the car, where I had been examining my tire because I ran over some trash someone threw out their window, I yelled back, “CALM DOWN, I’M RIGHT HERE AND THE A/C IS ON!”

Okay, so now that we have our first lesson under our belt, let’s all take some time to really think about what matters in this world. Things that matter include when your kid lights up like a Christmas tree because you learned all the words to the latest Selena Gomez hit or you learned how to level up on Minecraft. And kids, if you ask questions about the time your grandma stole a six-pack of beer and snuck it into the drive-in theatre, you’ll see that your grandma was probably actually kind of a fun rebel back in the day before your parents (Me/Us) drove them to the brink of insanity by pushing every button we could on their collective patience.

Be kind to each other out there. This world is tough and it’ll chew you up and spit you out and not even think twice about it. The least we can do is be nice to one another. Smile at someone today, say hello, or write an old-fashioned thank you card.

Love ya bunches!

-Katie