C-Flat: I think that every generation of parents is appalled at the way the next generation of kids is raised. To a great extent, with good reason. Over the last seventy or eighty years we've gone from "Sweet Sixteen and never been kissed" to "Sweet sixteen and only three abortions so far." My two sons are 33 and 27 now, and when I look back on when they were growing up in the 90's, it seems like the age of innocence. They had heavy metal (only allowed to be played at human levels at home)and black t-shirts, but in a way, even that seemed innocent. They took it about as seriously as most kids took Kiss. I listened to and enjoyed rock up until the suicide of Curt Cobain: "The Day the music died," 90's style. As rap and hip hoo took over and Michael Jackson became check-out counter magazine fodder, and R.E.M. became too precious for my taste, I've found pop music unlistenable. I guess that the thing that bothers me is, are most teenagers THAT pissedd off? They seem to want to annihilate themselves. O.k., maybe I want to Hold Your Hand was sappy, and completely dishonest, but at least it offered a sense of caring about someone else, not just using them. I don't know how you go about rasing a girl, period, because I rasied two boys. But, raising a girl now has to be very stressful.

But, then, just when I'm ready to give up on this generation, some even older codger starts waxing romantic about the forties. I usually bring the conversation to a screeching halt when I say, "Ah, yes, the forties... those were the days!, remember the holocaust? and when they still lynched blacks and didn't call them blacks?" Inter-racial couples walk the streets of my home town now (and live there) when in the fifties, if you were black and mistakenly stopped in my home town, you'd get out of there as fast as you could, out of fear or having profanities thrown at you.

I'm re-reading a wonderful book, Why Bad Things Happen Good People and the author makes an interesting point. He wonders if mankind is only a small step through the evolutionary process... especially morally and spiritually. I think that's an interesting theory. If that's the case, I can see us inching forward on some things... prejudice and a little wider acceptance of people who are different from us. But, when it comes to music, we've been walking in the wrong direction for a long time. Maybe not in terms of eternity, but in our own limited time frame. I keep hoping that there's going to be a turn-around one of these days. How much further can they take movies and music? Maybe there's a glimmer of hope in that this summer, several "G"-rated movies did exceptionally well, and some of innocuous, manufactured boy groups actually sing about romance. But man, the glimmers are mighty faint, right now.

When I raised my sons, I didn't let them have a lot of amterial stuff that their friends had, and amazingly, they didn't complain or try to make me feel guilty. They probably realized how futile that would have been. So, stand your ground, C. If your daughter gets too radicalized, make her go to her room and keep playing "Hip To Be Square" by our friend Huey, until she sees the light. :-)

Jerry