PROZACTA-MUNDO: OVERMEDICATING AMERICA ONE KID AT A TIME
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
I live in an over-medicated, pussified city. It’s not the same city I remember growing up in. I mean, one expects change but not this drastic. The neighborhoods I was warned never to enter, mostly because I wasn’t Hispanic, black or Asian, are now home to yuppies, hipsters and trend-setters from the Mid-West. Gentrification at its best can be found in New York City. But I digress. I always tend to get off point once hipsters enter my train of thought. Damn skinny jean wearin sons of bitches!


I was enjoying some tacos in a place called San Loco with my friend Tina one night. Its one of my favorite places to go and I usually overdo it and eat my weight in tacos. Just a plain hard shell beef taco at San Loco does a growing boy good. It’s long been a place of late night eats, and long conversation. While we were waiting for our second order of nachos to make their way to our table I started thumbing through a local newspaper. It wasn’t a major paper, just your typical liberal NYC rag littered with cultural, arts and music articles. Complete with ads for transvestite prostitutes in the back of the paper. I was midway through the paper when an article jumped out at me, made me drop a nacho and get nacho cheese on my crotch. The article was entitled “Is It Ok to Mix Alcohol With Prozac?” At first, I thought it was a joke. As I read on I saw it was no laughing matter, and it was serious article, part of an entire section devoted to psyche meds and the city. While reading this article I started getting angry. It made me feel as if I were the only person in NYC NOT on any sort of anti-depressant. It glamorized drugs such as Prozac and Lithium and then, the fucking kicker, it suggested knocking back a few cocktails with your dose!

Why did I get mad? For the same reason I usually do. The late, great, George Carlin coined a term I have come to use almost on a daily basis while walking the streets of Manhattan. Mr. Carlin had a knack for calling a spade a spade. He saw that people were becoming “soft”. He called this transformation “Pussification”. And I must say it suits New York City to perfection. Years of coddling America’s young and babying their every step has lead to the easy way out when it comes to raising our children. There’s a fucking pill for every little deficiency! Sad? Pop a Prozac. Anxiety? Pop a Xanax. Whatever happened to coping skills? Dealing with emotions rather than covering them up with pills? People have been raised to become pussies. NYC, as well as many other cities I’m sure, have become soft, and I blame poor and lazy parenting as the root cause of it all. Today parents have to peel their kids away from their internet, or gaming console in order to set up an outdoor playdate with another, equally coddled youngster. Think about it.


(And at the sake of sounding like an old man wagging his finger at a youngster saying, “When I was your age!!!”…)

I don’t know about you, but I use to look forward to blasting through the screen door and ringing my friends’ doorbells with that ever so gleeful, “Can so-and-so come out to play!?” I also didn’t have to wear a fucking helmet when I went for a ride on my bike. And trust me; if anyone needed a helmet, it was this guy. I know when I was building ramps to launch my Haro sky high into the Staten Island summer sky, a helmet was the last thing on my mind. When I brought home a bad report card my parents administered some sort of corporal punishment. They didn’t send me to a shrink to give me pills so I can concentrate more, get better grades in social studies and in short, become a blithering zombie who can’t fucking think for himself!

Do I have kids? Absolutely not. Maybe I don’t have any authority to belittle today’s parents? My answer is, yes, I, and everyone else has every right to rip on bad parents who continue to litter the neighborhoods with mindless morons who will eventually be our police officers, salesmen, and even that weird artsy kid who is making my latte. Rest assured, when and if I do decide to hatch a hell-spawn into this world you can guarantee, my kid will kick your kid’s ass!

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