Shining Thru

I have to wonder if kids today even know classic fairy tales, it seems to me that the media sources that we encourage today do everything in their power to distort the original work.  Like many things these days, it’s not what it use to be.  Fairy tales have been altered, and I don’t always think that’s a bad thing.  I think it might be a good thing to put Cinderella into a modern story line, even if it doesn’t carry some of the mystery that I feel comes with reading or watching about another time period, it might make little girls find the story more believable and inspire them to think it could be them one day, which I’m also not saying is a good or bad thing.  I think that we already entice our youth enough into believing that they can have or do anything that they want, but that’s for another post.

Sometimes I think Hollywood gets carried away by trying to make the younger generations interested in classic fairy tales by adding violence and cursing and just other extremes that take away from the innocence that was once found in nursery rhymes and fairy tales.  Maybe we want to see the happy ever after without feeling like we are watching a Shakespearean tragedy because dead bodies are covering the floor of the closing scene.  Maybe some of us like reading about the innocent love that the young couple is blinded into thinking will be perfect.

There are plays and movies out there like “Into the Woods,”  which I personally enjoy, but wouldn’t watch every day because it takes away the happy ever after part of the fairy tale that makes you feel good at the end of it.  Should we encourage such idealistic ideas in our children today?  Or should we push that it’s a harsh reality?

I’m not sure where the younger generation is headed, but it doesn’t look good.  Legislators keep trying to increase the curriculum and make everything look good on paper, but what it’s actually doing is forcing kids to give up.  No child left behind is plowing students over by trying to make them keep up with some made up standards by politicians that have never been inside a classroom, other than as a student.  I saw in the news that another student brought another gun to school….I think that it is so sad that we have to worry about such things.  As always the comments on the article were much more interesting that the article itself…people say all sorts of things from where are the parents, to that school is for the trash of the district anyway…Even if it is an alternative school how can we possible call children trash….Schools have a lot of issues these days and it scares me to think that these are the people of the generation that are suppose to be running things in the future.  If we don’t get it together and start worrying about the right issues I don’t understand how we expect improvements. What good are nice looking standardized test scores in the records office if children are running around on the streets or bringing the streets to the schools.  I don’t think that we realize all of the time what kind of issues are in the homes for the young people today, but I also don’t think that we should be making excuses for anyone, I think that the first step to having any real improvement is to hold people responsible for their own actions.

What are we teaching the younger generation when you can see a 15 year old throw a full out temper tantrum with stopping feet and slamming of doors?  What have we done to make that seem like it is ok past the age of 2.  We should be breaking our kids of that habit when they are 2 not when they are 20 and get fired from numerous jobs and end up on welfare because they can’t deal with things that happen in their work place, or when they don’t agree with their boss.  What are we teaching younger kids for them to think that if they stomp around, yell, or be rude and think that it will help them in any sort of way.  A teenager is way too old to be acting childish and not communicating like a young adult.  And yet it seems like more and more young adults are not maturing like they once did.  It seems like they are interested in things that are way beyond what they are ready for and try to be too much of an adult while still acting childish in their behaviors.  I know that the teenage years are hard for most people, but there comes a point when we need to realize that as a society we are failing to raise these young people in a way that will make them responsible and mature adults.  It’s the “gimme” generation.  Too many of our young people think that they are entitled to things that they have not earned and if they are not given what they want then they have the right to complain, yell, stomp, and be rude as if they had something to be offended over.  If parents don’t begin to raise their kids the way they need to as a parent instead of as a friend, they these problems will continue to grow.

“Plastic, they’ve learned…”  A quote from X-Men:  The last stand. 

I thought the quote was pretty clever when I watched the movie for the first time today.  It got me thinking if we ever really learn that quickly, or if it takes time and time again of failure before someone figures out that the same thing is going to happen every time. 

Things seem so much clearer in the movies…in reality you watch people make the same painstakingly stupid mistakes, but there’s nothing you can do to convince them that they are being stupid.  So many people want to stick with what they have planned, even when the plan is obviously not working.  They could be going down in flames and still say, don’t do anything, stick to the flight plan….Have we really failed in our society to the point that people can not make on the spot decisions to make things better?  To change direction because things aren’t going as planned?  Why is it so hard for people to see something that is not working and logically say, we need a new plan…instead they generally say let’s try it one more time the same way…..

What is so wrong with change?  Why can’t we learn from our mistakes?  I’m not sure when mistakes became so bad that we can’t own up to them, but I think it would be much more useful for us to embrace our mistakes as learning experiences. 

But people will keep making the same mistakes until we create a society that can think on their feet, is more innovative, and doesn’t keep falling in the same traps, letting history repeat itself, time and time again.