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2004-01-05 - 12:51 p.m.

A Kid's World Is A Hand-Me-Down World

Culture is hand-me-downs.

Today’s kids have precious little they can call their own. Much of youth culture today is hand-me-down from my childhood. I am the generation Disneyland was built for. The 49-year-old Magic Kingdom, the granddaddy theme park leading the way for several imaginative Disney playgrounds and a cruise line, continues to attract hundreds of thousands of kids who think the spectacular Tomorrowland and Fantasyland attractions were constructed primarily for them. Not true. Disneyland was built for the Baby Boomers.

The Hamburger Boulevards in every city and town are (profitable) testimony today’s young people exist on fast food. My generation gave them McDonalds.

Mine was the first generation to have Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Even in a new century, all the best Christmas TV specials come from the 60s. A Charlie Brown Christmas, How The Grinch Stole Christmas and Frosty The Snowman are still being rerun today. The only other Christmas classics running every year are Miracle on 34th Street and It’s A Wonderful Life! A new generation is captivated by the 60’s specials, and kiddy sponsors are competing to plug the advertising holes for these old programs the same today as they did when I was a kid.

A lot of little girls are running around in thigh high mini skirts dangerously close to being X-rated, all thanks to fashion designers from my youth.

This is definitely a flashback to the 60s, but the outfit’s three thousand dollar price tag is more aligned with today’s trends!

Forty-years after its introduction, The Elevated Orthopedic Nightmare is back. After several merciful years in oblivion, the platform shoe is clunking about again. I see kids staggering and wobbling around in the teetering shoes and think back to emergency rooms full of people being treated for twisted or broken ankles caused by the raised footgear. Today’s kids have absorbed some outlandish trends, but the platform shoe was—and is—a bad fad!

Originally introduced in the 1940s, tattooing gained popularity in the 1960s. Then it was mostly the markings of skull and crossbones, skeletons and expressions popular with the bikers who displayed the body art. Considered seedy and sinful forty years ago, tattooing is in vogue today, and most of the kids see the butterflies and hearts and arm bracelets and ankle snakes as a rebellion against rules and as individual statements of self-expression, oblivious to the fact that their rebellion and self-expression were already voiced—or painted on—during The Age of Aquarius!

The generation of the 60s invented popular music performed by young people. Up until then the charts were dominated by big bands and elderly crooners. When Elvis, The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones burst onto the scene, a totally different sound was born. And, although hardly recognizable in the current hyped up dynamics and agitated instrumentation and vocals, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell have all influenced contemporary music.

Sometimes I feel sorry for the kids. Aside from computers and assorted other electronic wizardry, there’s not a lot today’s kids can claim as distinctive in their youth culture. In spite of declarations of independence and assertions of individuality and inimitability, kids are living with the hand me downs from my generation.

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