City Kids Earning Money? GTFO!

Yesterday I went over to mom’s place to fetch another package slip. This time it was the clothes I’d ordered from the n00bstore (PP) which I’d been waiting on during the last weeks. So I was walking up the street, right, and when I look up I see a kid further up the road selling something. I continued my walk carefully as I thought it might turn out nasty.

It was a little girl selling hot chocolate plus some crap she’d probably found in her room or in a dumpster. That was all OK and fine by me, but what wasn’t was that this – and this only – was her way of earning summer money – the kind of dough you’d spend carelessly on stuff you don’t need, during the summer. Probably so she could afford that pony she’d always been wanting.

I’ve seen more than this one girl selling crap and more useless crap so they’ll hopefully earn some money to spend during the summer vacation. I even saw a kid who did karaoke on Karl Johan – Oslo’s most tourist filled street – while he was wearing some kind of costume trying to poorly impersonate a tiger. What kind of sickness has this generation of kids been infected with? Are the politicians to blame, or perhaps the capitalism that reign in kids’ mind because of their lacking ability to block out commercials? No. It’s all the parents’ fault. I’m not saying that their parents should just give them the money, oh no, not at all. I’m just saying that they should teach their children to actually do something for the money. You know, make them feel they’ve earned it.

I still remember being a kid up in Northern Norway, where a frozen Hell is bad comedy and polar bears roam the streets from time to time. There I had to chop wood and carry it inside, while it was fucking freezing outside, almost every other day. Without the fire we’d freeze to death instantly. Another daily activity was shoveling snow; clearing paths and making it possible for my mother to park her car when she got home from work. If you’ve never shoveled snow in minus degrees while the god damned snow just keeps falling down, you don’t have a single clue on how though it can be on a human being. In retrospective I always think that whatever “summer money” I got was deserved and it felt right.

During summer we also used to visit our grandma who lived down south. There we spent most of our time bathing in a lake that grandma was a co-owner of, playing different kinds of games (not video- or computer games), reading MAD-magazines and just having a great vacation. But then again, labouring was just around the corner. Grandma always had lots of stuff that needed doing, like carrying all the chopped pieces of wood and stack it up in her basement and mowing the insanely huge fucking lawn. We got paid by the hour. We worked, oh we worked our asses off.

Another place the family, used to visit, was my aunt & uncle’s place up north. We used to work our asses off, either to earn money or to survive the harsh winter. I mean, when it’s snowing snowballs at the size of your fists, you’d want to stay near the fireplace and keep it alive for as long as you’d want to experience the next summer. Anyway, we did our chores and we did alot of heavy work, like painting some walls during the summer. Don’t think painting a wall is tough work? Try it when there’s a zillion mosquitos trying to vampirize your blood while standing on top of a ten foot ladder with a bucket of red paint in one hand and a brush in the other. I can still feel the itches on a restless night, knowing that if I scratch a little teenie weenie bit, I can’t stop for weeks.

My point, if you haven’t already got it, is that when I was a kid I had to work for my money. I had to do real work where I got dirty, sweaty and at least three bruises on four different places. So I did what was necessary of me in that particular situation. I trashed the shop, drank all the beverages and slapped her silly across the face. Then she started crying and ran home, I suppose. Great hot chocolate though, I tell you.

City kids – creepy, smelly urban dimwits – earning their vacation money by selling craploads of junk, hot chocolate and themselves? GTFO!