In my day…

It sounds old, I know.

But, in my day, my folks let me ride my bike with only the helmet God issued me. Our treehouses were precarious animal lairs of wedged boards perched high above the backyard! I remember swimming… in a pond. A pond… with green stuff all in it. And… I opened my eyes. That was forty years ago. And I didn’t catch tetanus/amebic dysentery or blackwater fever. I did get Green Stuff all over me, though, and scared the girls like I was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Scary stuff.

Lawn Darts! Heads up!

Today’s parents will likely shake their heads at such neglect. As you’ve no doubt divined, my subject is “Helicoptering”, and its effect on the current brood of nestlings, as well as what it says about us, the parental generation that can’t seem to let go. I am guilty as anyone. My beloved genius Classics-trained daughter is off to college, and I find myself absentmindedly on e-Bay pricing Airstream trailers to serve as my just-off-campus observation post for the next four years. After all, there really is nothing new to this over-protective parenting aspect. General MacArthur’s mom spent Douglas’ cadet years at the Hotel Thayer at West Point, and he turned out pretty fully realized. No lack of self-esteem there.

And that’s the nub of the issue, right there: Self-esteem. Consider this gem, from a cartoon, no less, the incredible The Incredibles when Dash says to his mother, “If everyone is special, then no one is.” Leave aside for the moment that producer Pixar was flying a major Ayn Randian trial balloon: consider for a second what I see as a world that celebrates mediocrity over achievement, norms over exceptionalism. Also, factor in that I am still watching cartoons.

I feel we’re bending towards a cultural reality that demands not mere equality at the start, but at the finish. This tendency is expressed in grade inflation, in the inflation of college costs, and in inflation, in general. And no, this is not a rant about the price of a semester of college. Don’t get me started on that.

This is about a tendency on the part of everyone, not just high-self-esteem kids who are about to slam into the worst job market in nearly a century, but a trend that everyone from investment bankers to politicians to athletes to you and me is evidencing to look to an in loco parentis for a bailout. An interceding parent to make it all okay. A “Get Out of Jail Free” card… for the same old adolescent reason: All the other kids were doing it. “Helicoptering”, itself a relatively recent addition to the lexicon of parenthood is now joined by “Doormatting”, where the new job-seeker’s self-esteem encounters its first real test, and the disappointed twenty-something returns home to live with his or her parents and takes the frustration out on them. It’s all your fault! So we take it, like doormats. Because, maybe, it is our fault.

A lot of it has to do with everyone “Lawyering Up”. Trampolines now come with safety nets all around, so kids are even spared the rebuke of gravity and physics. No need to stay on target or within the boundaries, now. Somehow, it all adds up to making America’s Funniest Videos somewhat less wince-inducing. Well, there’s always Tosh.O.

By taking the risk out of kid’s lives, we blind them to the potentials of results, good and bad. A super-clean house leaves a child’s immune system defenseless (surely a bad thing for an “immune system”). An absence of schoolyard fights results in an incomplete understanding of the use of physical force. Today, teens drinking too much are more likely to be shepherded to the ER for a stomach pump rather than rolled on their side to awaken in their own vomit, to learn the old-fashioned way of the dangers of drink.

By taking the risk out of kid’s lives, we blind them to the potentials of results, good and bad. A super-clean house leaves a child’s immune system defenseless (surely a bad thing for an “immune system”). An absence of schoolyard fights results in an incomplete understanding of the use of physical force. Today, teens drinking too much are more likely to be shepherded to the ER for a stomach pump rather than rolled on their side to awaken in their own vomit, to learn the old-fashioned way the dangers of drink.

Let the kids play. Don’t be all that surprised, or worried, then, if they come home all covered in green slime. It builds character. And characters.

This is no ordinary lunch truck or food wagon or roach coach. The Cooking Channel was out feeding hungry New Yorkers with a gourmet touch. In multiple ways they are creating a very deep relationship with their target – through their stomachs and not their TVs! Loyalty being gained on the street and not on the couch! Also a nice job of marketing their brand online and creating a larger following of repeat customers through social media netwo Facebook and Twitter (see logos on truck).

Moore & Giles displayed a true road show when their showroom Airstream showed up in the parking lot of one of my favorite clothing stores. What a great use of the iconic “silver bullet” to showcase the innovative values of the company. Nice mobility too. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Moore & Giles Road Show

Perhaps it is the anonymity of the text message that makes it so acceptable an approach to screwing up one’s courage to address the desired person? Or, in the case of a senior lad from Shelton High School, it became an acceptable approach to screwing up not just his prom but his chances of receiving his diploma with the rest of the class. “HMU” Hit Me Up, indeed. He got “hit up” with a suspension.

It’s not just limited to painfully shy adolescents attempting to pre-empt the norms of greeting and the exposure to potential embarrassment, or trying to insulate themselves from the potential discourtesy of the correspondent… after all, who can forget the unmixed brutality of the fast-shifting high school hierarchies and briefly intersecting Venn Diagrams of alpha, beta, jocks, artistes, smokers, cheerleaders, motorheads, nerds, stoners, theatricals, each struggling to navigate their own swollen emotions and hormones propelling them through each day?

Or consider the “analog” text message in the second picture (my daughter’s invite). It’s amazing how the media and messages may change, but the hormones continue to handle the driving. And it’s been ever so.

No, it’s not just the boys afraid to talk to girls or girls tongue-tied with fear of prom non-invitation. It’s a valid way to talk. And, at the same time, not-talk. Consider:

Dear Abby (or someone) once opined that your telephone answering machine served as your butler, in the sense that it could be used as a screen to keep you from unwelcome visitation.

So it is with our texting society and the inarguable fact that we (adults, adolescents, whoever) assume a sort-of autism as we walk, drive and even bathe our way through the messages on iPhone or Blackberry. It is a useful barrier for avoiding looking directly at what’s before us, and it’s creating a significant “digital distance.”

My hope is that the boys found the courage to follow up the next day or days and ask, “Hey, did you get my invitation?” but that’s asking a lot.

And hey, when you think about it, how many of those people with the Jawbone earpieces do you think are really just talking to themselves?

We’ve all really got to work on getting better at this face-to-face thing.

“I am well aware that we are not offering the full complement of service on which you have come to rely. There will be crowding on trains and reliability of the service will be difficult to maintain.” Howard Permut, President, MTA Metro-North Railroad

You don’t say, Howard?

The indignities heaped on the commuter by Metro-North New Haven last winter will never be forgotten. From loading into a standees-only morning diesel on a frigid January morning to waiting come eventide with an increasingly restive and growing throng clustered around the “Departures” screen for you guys to decide which track we were then going to trample the elderly and infirm to reach in the nick of departure time…

Let me put it this way. I don’t mind waiting. Good things come to people who wait. But the soda-sticky, newspapery chaos and standing-room-only state of affairs on the trains was unforgivable. Particularly for $4,000 a year for the honor of the ride.

I’ve said it before. Psychologists tell us that the reason we get frustrated with waiting comes from recognizing how much time we’ve already lost, and secondly, from the uncertainty of how much more we’re going to have to idle away waiting through that third round of hold music.

From waiting in line at the coffee shop or the Super Bowl to the elevator (I’m told that the most-often pressed button in the elevator is the “Door Close” button, but that, by law in the US, all such buttons are deactivated… which doesn’t stop me pressing it) to waiting for a train, my irreplaceable, precious time is being wasted. Like real estate… they aren’t making any more of it.

Still, it beats walking, I guess. But this is the kind of waiting I hate, and which brands had better be on their damndest guard to prevent. We had no choice with the trains… (we’ve waited 10 years for upgrades to M8s and upon launch it was announced there would be more delays)  but with everything else, from airline brands to hotel brands to coffee-shop brand environments, everyone should understand that valuing my and other consumer’s time is the greatest respect you can show us.

I don’t care if the person rushing to my assistance at the other end of the 800 number is telling me her name is “Jenny” in a voice accented with the notes of the Tennessee River Valley. If you are striving to help me, showing me you esteem my time as much as I do, you are going to win my loyalty. Even a huge error on the part of your brand can be thus turned to your favor and make a partisan out of me.

Instead, I get Metro-North telling me that the “catenary” atop the train has broken and that the century-old infrastructure is slowing everything down due to the winter weather. Wow. Winter. Never saw it coming, I guess.

Is it raining down my leg? I don’t think so, Howard. So don’t tell me it is.

I want my time back, from all of you. Who has any to trade? No one. That’s how precious it is.