By David Rose
I might lose my senior discount for this, but kids today have it tougher than we did when I was a teenager. It’s the sacred duty of every generation to adopt fashion and behavior designed to make the previous generation want to chew carpet tacks. For us it was easy.
The generation Boomers had to rattle was as square as any this side of Plymouth Rock. It’s hard for kids today to fathom how tight-assed society was back then.
Consider the lyrics of today’s music with their glorification of sex, drugs, and violence. Now consider this – In 1958, Link Wray’s recording of “Rumble” was banned from the radio for being subversive and encouraging juvenile delinquency. Rumble was an instrumental.
All we boomers had to do was grow our hair until it touched top of our ears. Kids today have to labor like Hercules just to be considered typical. They must dress like a Gothic rodeo clown, streak their hair one of the livelier shades of Jell-O, and style it with a Garden Weasel. Then they must get tattooed like they did a double nickel in Folsom and add enough body piercing so they whistle like a colander.
We need to do something to lighten their load. Perhaps we should develop universal, 1950s-style school uniforms featuring flat-top haircuts, poodle skirts, penny loafers, and sweater sets. If a teen could be a rebel simply by un-tucking his shirt tail or rolling her skirt above the knee it would save everybody involved a lot of pain and agony.
As an artist, David Rose won both the Arkansas Governor’s Award and the Delta Award. His works are in the collections of Tim Robbins, Bruce Springsteen, & Susan Sarandon.
As a writer he flunked every English class he ever sat in. Born in Woodstock, NY, he is very much a product of the 1960s and never really managed to escape that fabled decade. Visit Rose at www.amazon.com/David-Malcolm-Rose/e/B019GBJI9C/ and on Facebook.
