I know I’m something of a sixty one year old curmudgeon, or as my wife calls me, a crudmudgeon, but…
Hey kid! Pull up your pants! I have 8 days left in a thirty-two year high school teaching career, and one of the stranger developments in that time has been the tendency of teenage boys and young men in their early 20’s to wear their pants so that somewhere between four inches and ten inches of underwear shows. What’s up with that? These kids buy pants that are three or four sizes too big, then pull them down so that the exact amount of ass that they want to display is hanging out there. I always thought that the purpose of the pants was to cover the ass. Not so.
Sometimes these kids have their entire butts exposed. The pants are belted just under the cheeks. The entire unit is cinched around the very tops of their thighs. They can’t walk right. Sometimes they can’t walk at all, but rather skip and hop along in a spastic, awkward sort of dance, occasionally pulling those pants up just so they don’t fall completely down around their ankles. I confess to wanting to pull those pants down and then pushing the kid over. I know it’s not very professional of me, but I can’t help it. It would almost certainly be a career ender, the old yank and shove, but my career has nearly ended anyway. The troublesome idea of a lawsuit and possible incarceration is a deterrent, but still, the temptation.
I know we have horrible unemployment and a housing crisis, but it’s those pants that really are the issue. We can’t fix the big stuff. Our politicians don’t even seem all that interested in trying. But as one nation, under God, indivisible, we should at least be able to pull up our pants.
