Sorry for being MIA the last few days. If you’ve been following the site for a while, you probably remember me mentioning that I sometimes help my brother run his chocolate stores. Well, as I’m sure you can imagine, Valentine’s Day is huge for his business, so we’ve been very busy for the last several days.

I’ve got a couple topics and a movie review chomping at the bit to be written, but I wanted to start by telling you a quick story…

My brother’s most popular store is in a gigantic outlet mall, complete with one of the largest movie theaters on the east coast, Medieval Times, Dave & Buster’s, and various other big name places you can go to spend too much money to see bad movies and knights with digital wristwatches whack each other with fake swords. People come from all over the tri-state area to shop there, but the mall itself is located in Ghettoville. The area is dominated by white kids fascinated with black street culture, so as you walk through the mall you can see as many as a dozen Vanilla Ices at a time.

What follows loosely ties into something I’ve touched on before; that all the wrong people are having children, leading to a large number of kids who are raised poorly and just don’t know how to act. Picture Tom Sizemore and Courtney Love with a litter of six children with Attention Deficit Disorder and you’ll begin to understand what I mean.

Monday, the day before Valentine’s Day, my brother and I are dipping literally thousands of strawberries in gourmet chocolate, like a couple of 6-foot Irish Oompa Loompas. My brother is much better at this type of thing, so he’s handling the milk chocolate dipping, which amounts to about 80% of our orders. The milk chocolate dipping machine sits near the store’s front window, so people can see you dipping all kinds of dreamy stuff in chocolate, enticing them to hopefully come in and spend an amount of money that’ll enable my brother to buy a BMW.

So he’s sitting there dipping away when two cute little girls approach the window and start watching him. Keep in mind that these girls are maybe 6 years old, if that, with no parents in sight. He adores kids, so he smiled and waved, then resumed dipping. One of the girls knocked on the window to get his attention, so he leaned close to the glass so he could hear her. They had the following conversation…

My Brother: “Hi!”

Little Girl: “What’s that?”

My Brother: (big smile) “These are chocolate covered strawberries.”

Little Girl: “Can I have one for free?”

My Brother: “Sorry, honey. These are for all of those people waiting in line.”

Little Girl: (indignant scowl) “Fuck You!”

Now, my brother, who is a father of four, was immediately struck dumb by this. He was dipping all day, non-stop, but production immediately screeched to a halt. His jaw dropped as the two little girls turned and walked away. He was totally blown away by this girl’s profane proclamation, especially being that she was no more than 5 or 6 years old.

My reaction, on the other hand, was twofold…

1) Inside, I was pissed. I wanted to follow this kid back to her parents and beat them to death with whatever was handy, which at that moment was a large bowl of strawberries and a drizzling spoon. With just two little words, this kid had proven every theory I have about unfit parents and the deteriorating levels of education and respect in American culture.

2) Outside, I laughed so hard and so long that I almost peed on myself. A kindergartener shouting “Fuck You!” at the candy man… That’s comedy, folks.

So here’s my question: Are we not teaching manners anymore? First of all, when I was a kid, Halloween was the one day where we were allowed to walk around begging for free shit. Our parents taught us not to impose on others or expect something for nothing. Walking around in public acting like a freeloading beggar woulda been a no-no, punishable by a fine of up to two weeks’ allowance, 20-30 minutes in the corner, and a lifelong If You Ever probationary term with details of punishment for repeat offenses contained therein, i.e. “If You Ever do that again, I’ll beat you till your eyes fall out!”

Secondly, what happened to the obligatory parental policies on strangers, like don’t talk to strangers, don’t take candy from strangers, and if a stranger ever asks you to help find his dog, do it? (That last one may just have been for me, cuz I was a Bad Kid, and at some point I’m convinced my folks were trying to get rid of me.) Anyway, are these rules not still in effect? Did we find and kill all of the bad strangers, or were strangers okay all along, and the rules were just another bullshit story parents made up to scare us, like Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and the one about the kid whose head exploded when he mixed Pop Rocks with Dr. Pepper?

And lastly, not to sound like a broken record, but where were her goddamn parents? Letting your kids run around in a mall unsupervised is like cutting Robert Downey, Jr. loose in a crystal meth lab.

Americans should stop having children until we raise our collective IQ. I don’t give a shit about the snow and crazy taxes. I’m moving to Canada.

Tags: parenting, ADHD, timeout, bad kids