When I was 7 years old, Topps Chewing Gum, was in the process of distributing their second series of their successful Wacky Packages line of kid's stickers that parodied named brand products. I collected the first series and loved them, I actually enjoyed collecting them more than baseball cards.
I still remember many of my favorite Wacky's, like it was yesterday.
During Topps' second series however, they produced my all time favorite sticker. It was a parody of Ronzoni brand macaroni called "Run Tony". I was lucky enough to get one but stupidly stuck it on one of my school notebooks. I had hoped that I'd have no problem getting a duplicate to save. But this was just before Ronzoni apparently complained to Topps that the sticker was degrading to Italian-Americans. Topps, who were probably skirting copyright laws in the first place, agreed to drop the sticker in the series and I was never able to get a duplicate sticker in subsequent purchases. But this innocent request was the beginning of a societal landslide that was coming.
I grew up in an Italian neighborhood and found nothing degrading about the sticker. I was proud of my Italian heritage and it's not like replacing the "Run Tony" sticker was going to somehow magically free my fellow Italians of the Mafia stigma. Damn, it was just a harmless joke. I guess this was the beginning of the end of people being able to laugh at themselves and the start of an uptight baby boomer generation that would become the most over sensitive and lawsuit generating bunch of SOB's in history.
With every year that passed, more and more things were beginning to be deemed as offensive and taken away. But it didn't stop there. The over-sensitive and over-protective attitudes started to creep into childhood games and activities.
They started taking away all the fun by making kids wear bicycle helmets, which has pretty much kept the majority of kids off bikes in subsequent generations. Hell, my friends and I lived on our bikes as kids. And we lived in New York City! You hardly see too many kids riding bikes anymore.
They started giving everyone trophies for participating in sports and took away all incentive to win. All of a sudden all of our games and the lessons we learned winning and losing them would be changed forever. They took away dodgeball over the years and last week I read a story about a school in Massachusettes banning tag because they are afraid of lawsuits from parents suing when their kids get hurt playing it. Props to Jammer for finding this nugget.
I'm sorry but if I'm a judge sitting on a case for a parent suing over a game of tag, I'm ordering a beheading of the lawsuit happy parent as a message to the rest of this country.
These parents who are "protecting" their kids pretty much by placing them in a plastic bubble are the same ones who allow their children to play ultra violent video games and whose kids can be heard hurling racial slurs and homocidal epithets at anonymous adults on X-box Live, where their stupid parents have no idea what they are doing.
Way to go assbag baby boomer parents. You raised some real trophies of human beings. Kids that can't pick themselves off the ground in the real world. Kids that have no healthy fear of authority. Kids that don't know the sacrifice and hard work that is involved in suceeding in life. Kids that are constantly praised for mediocrity (Can you say 3rd grade graduation? Are you fucking kidding me?).
Jeez, all that because I didn't get another "Run Tony" sticker. I may just need some psychiatric help to help deal with baby boomers and how they changed the world for the worst.
Generation X'ers of the world unite! I'd tell you to raise your children against this prevalent stupidity, but so few of you even have kids. I've done my part with my children and I hope all of you do the same.
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