lol This thread reminds me so much of something my uncle once said to my friends and me when we were in our teens. It went something like, "The shit you kids get away with now we could never have gotten away with when we were young." It had a tinge of irony to it because we, of course, didn't think that what we were doing was that bad, but also because he would usually follow the sentence up with a story or two of something he did in his teens and we'd be standing their wide-eyed with an are-you-serious look on our faces (You did that and lived?). Now that I'm getting a bit older and I look back on the present day kids and what they are doing, I tend to have the same thoughts as my uncle ("We'd never have gotten away with that."). Of course, I imagine if one took a step back and looked at the broader picture, one might see that kids will be kids, and the resemblance from one generation to the next will be almost identical. Sure, their surroundings may change, their outlets, their "playgrounds" and lifestyles, and so on, but I think at the heart of the idea, the generations are all relatively the same. It's the perspective that changes, and the perspective that cannot remain as a constant. Basically, the "generation now" cannot judge itself against generations of the past because they cannot know fully what the generations of the past were like. Likewise, the past generations cannot judge themselves against future generations either because they cannot fully immerse themselves into the present day generation. Was the "shit" my uncle did in his youth really not as bad as the "shit" I did in my youth or was it worse? I don't think anyone can really answer that because neither side experienced both occurrences . . . if that makes sense. You can make observations, but in almost all cases, your observations will be inaccurate or skewed. According to a few of the posts in this thread, I am one of the 10 percenters because I have never smoked marijuana to this date. But if I compiled my own observations, I would say that percentage is erroneous because 60 percent of my friends never touched marijuana either. But perhaps my friends and I only made up less than a tenth of a percentage of that 10 percent ... I have no idea. But generalizations of people I tend to view as a bad practice. It's like saying rich people are pricks, poor people are lazy, and people who use drugs will fail at life. None are facts. They may be true in some cases, but the mere fact that they aren't true in all cases makes them inaccurate. And they are usually a turn-off for the folks that are put into that generalization yet aren't really a part of it. They immediately see it as not true, and by that token, they will then see you as a liar for making that generalization and you will lose credibility.
