These Dreams Of You

I like to think I provide enough of a counterbalance for my children to prevent them developing that thick, oily blubber-layer of entitlement everyone tells me is a danger to modern youth. The only surefire way to avoid the cruel fate of the unloveable self-involved is to make sure they develop a profound and tactile sense of responsibility for their actions. The problem is my kids are all (so far) capable, intelligent, grounded children with so little penchant for misbehavior substantial enough to construct effective corrective examples. What I've done to compensate for the burden of well-behaved children is I let them develop their responsibility-handling skills by taking on the consequences of my actions. I panic when I see them wash the dishes without complaint or make their beds without asking. How am I supposed to teach them anything if, when I ask them to do something, they just... do it?

They almost always notice when I kick the dog, though. They'll look at me with askance and pity and I'll have to shout "THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU BRING HOME AN A-MINUS!" It's a painful lesson (mostly for the dog), but anyone will tell you: when you're a parent, sometimes you have to improvise. There's a lot at stake.

Of course you hope that when you send them out there, outside of your enveloping, all-encompassing grasp, they're going to continue to develop. It's only a matter of time before they shed the homework drills and the dinner times, the curfews and the electronic tracking ankle bracelet and make their way into the world, hopefully to build on the foundation of suspicion and fear every animal needs to survive. It's evolution. If you're wondering what your kids should look like if they're going to last a minute on their own, try picking up a feral cat. That should tell you all you need to know. Evolution tends not to mince words.

Trends in parenting are sliding in the wrong direction, however. The paranoia and fear are there, sure, but the reaction seems to be more bubble-wrap, more packing foam, more inflate-on-impact airbags. No one is every going to invent the jet-packs we were promised because everyone's too busy trying to invent forcefields.

When I lived in the dorms in college, I had three roommates. One was a Brazilian exchange student, a passionate Latin man who was given to politely vigorous sex with his Brazilian exchange student girlfriend (sort of missing the cosmopolitan point, I thought, but they weren't asking) on the top bunk of our shared, all-wooden bunk bed left over from the Eisenhower administration. I think he tried to be unobtrusive about it, but the basic physics of biodegradation and dry-rot will not be gainsaid. I'm not sure how exactly to characterize how bumpy and noisy a ride it was for me except to say I no longer long for the sea.

Roommates #2 and #3 were both just run-of-the-mill assholes in their own petty ways, both lamenting the fact that the low-rent state school we were attending wasn't the low-rent state school they preferred.

Those experiences were at turns uncomfortable and miserable and maddening and demoralizing each in their own ways, but they had some value. With the latter two, I confirmed that my hometown (where my university also was) was just as scorned and belittled and disregarded by people from outside of it as I'd always thought it might be. And with the first one I learned that if you take Nyquil together with dramamine, sometimes you can talk to Jesus.

New college students today, though, are unstrapping the five-point harnesses affixing them to their padded family nests in order to go off to college and experience... someone hand-picked to be exactly like themselves. I'll spare you reading the entire linked article by telling you that, like all good entertainment endeavors, the money shot comes right at the end:

“We like all the same movies, the same music and the same books,” [an online roommate matching site user] said. “I met her mother, and I thought, ‘Your mother is so much like mine,’ and her father too. I feel like I’m talking to myself sometimes.”

Look, I understand going off to college is scary. And if you can control elements of it, you feel more secure. And if you are able to manage to partially reconstruct your comfort zone, I can certainly see how it would make the otherwise wrenching transition easier.

But I don't know that you want to go to college to feel like you're talking to yourself so much. Sure, there are all the points to make about growth through struggle and benefits of exposing oneself to a breadth of human experience, blah blah blah. My main fear in this? More douchebags.

Absence of reflection makes you a douchebag. Echo chambers can only make douchebags. And colleges are already prone to douchebaggery. Count the backward baseball caps and the soul patches and the hackey sack circles on any college campus. These are places that expose young women to Sylvia Plath and young men to reggae. The roommate provides a pivotal role as an antibody to this particular debilitating condition. Sometimes, more than anything, we need a contemptuous eye-roll to remind us that there are consequences to our actions. We need someone to tell us "Hey, you're not the first fucking person to discover Van Morrison, Sheila! Jesus, I'm trying to study!" There should be consequences to your choices. Even the good ones.

Just to be clear, my worries are selfish. If I want to be surrounded by douchebags, I can do that by choice. I live in Southern California. I just don't want them to be everywhere at once. But I don't worry for the kids themselves really. I'm not given to panic about the fate of coming generations. Every time I hear consternation over the unfitness of the kids today, I remember Plato was saying the same thing like 3,000 years ago. If you read Republic, it's all about how kids were indolent, short-sighted, violent, corrupted by entertainment and the inevitable doom of a once-great society. And it doesn't bother me at all that, in his case at least, he turned out to be right.