A passing fashion, is humanity.

Some days, I find myself stopping to look at the world around me. I breathe in the air that is now supposedly tainted with years of pollution and chemicals and open my eyes to the people, the buildings, the streets, everything. I see the women walking with their too-high heels and men in their business suits. I see the teenagers of ambiguous age sitting on park benches wearing too much make up and smoking Winfield cigarettes like their mommy and daddy do while they bare skinny, pre-pubescent chicken legs to their boyfriends or their over-sized pants around their ankles in a gesture of apparent fashion that I am more than inclined to curl my lip at. 


This is what I see whenever I stop and actually look at the world. I see chaos, ruin and anarchy in illegally bought cigarettes, caked on make-up three shades too dark and clothes that would be abhorred in nightclubs. Is this what our world has come to? When different is strange and weird, and conformity is considered more than a fad, it's a way of life. Look at us, the sheep to the shepherd that is the media, happy to follow them in their paths of rebellion and the acts that should have been limited to adulthood. I will admit now that while I do drink and smoke, I have a notion of limits. I will smoke socially and drink socially, neither of which I usually do alone. But I have only been drunk once, nor have I ever been under the influence of drugs. But now there are boys and girls years my junior doing exactly that. Smoking everyday. Drinking to the point of total inebriation every weekend. Fucking their 'boyfriends' after two weeks and insisting that it was love. 


Whether it is ignorance or an incredible talent for denial, our generations have faltered and stopped. Their intelligence quickly becomes stunted, their speech lacking in anything short of repetitive expletives as they scream at each other in an apparent show of communication. Who are these girls in orange make-up and cheap mascara? Who are these boys with their marijuana habits and backwards hats? I don't know them. Society won't recognize them. Parents turn their backs, either in ignorance or denial or dismissal or shame. I won't ever know. I don't want to ask for fear of what they will tell me. 


Is this what humanity has become? A chaotic 'institute' where the bastard children of a broken generation run free, their lives a downward spiral? The young are the future, and if so the future is a bleak one. I would pray to them if I thought that God had not already abandoned all hope. 


- K.B & M. H