Art in FL: "The evidence is that no matter how weak and dumb the kids seem collectively they always do okay. If any generation had failed catastrophically across the board we wouldn't be here."

I think you're wrong here. This is one whole new ballgame. There has NEVER been a generation so incredibly dependent on technology. Everything they do and everything they 'know' depends on electronics. People say they can 'build' a computer. What they're really talking about is just hooking some finished components together. They aren't 'building' anything.

Turn off the power for a week and see what happens.

JBMat was dead on. If it doesn't involve electronics, most kids are crippled. Many of them are fundamentally illiterate. They can barely read, it's agony to compose a basic sentence, they can't do basic math without a calculator. Besides the sign-up bonuses offered, the main attraction of joining the military seems to be that they will have another mommy to tell them what to do and when to do it. They still don't really have to think.

They have no work ethic at all. They'll make a token effort at a job (offered $10/hr) and then just walk away.

They don't know how to figure things out using their own brain. It isn't that they can't get it exact, they aren't even in the ballpark.

They can't make change. I gave a young clerk a ten and a one for a $6 item. She didn't know what to do and had to call a manager.

They are so used to having everything done for them, I have a young rail conductor who refuses to lock the railroad gate behind us as we leave the railroad property. It doesn't have anything to do directly with his train, so he feels that it isn't his job.

I hurt my thumb and was having trouble gripping things. I asked the boy across the street (10) how much he would charge to fill in the 24"x12" hole with the loose soil piled right beside the hole. He wanted $20, which would have worked out to about $80/hr.

My sister nearly got killed a few days ago when a couple of teenage girls drove through the freeway center divider (for emergency vehicles, signed "do not enter") and made a U-turn into the fast lane of I-5 at 5:30p.m. and dodged right into traffic... with a stick shift. My sister said they nearly caused a 10-car, 2-semi wreck, and they were laughing all the way.

Not only do the rules of the road not apply to them, they think the laws of PHYSICS don't apply to them.

And what about the lying parents and grandparents who keep insisting that their kid/grandkid wouldn't steal gas, doesn't scream up and down the street on 4-wheelers or motorcycles, doesn't mow down the neighbors' plants with their truck? How do they think this is helping?

And their sense of entitlement is approximately the size of the Milky Way. If it isn't given as an expected gift, and whining and screaming doesn't get it, they'll just steal it from someone else, or shoplift it.

Have you read anything they've written? It's all written like they text, a 500-word run-on sentence. Between the abbreviations and the misspellings, it makes no sense at all.

The bottom line is that if all the people who do all the caretaking and all the real work simply vanished, the Nincompoop Generation would probably die off. If you've read The Disappearance by Philip Wylie, you'll know what I mean.

Sue