Teenage kids and the value of stupid

I am probably old and out of touch with teenage kids nowadays,which is the only explanation feasible due to the way they make me feel.  Over the last week, ever since the school holidays began there's a lot of them about.  Kids in groups, walking about as though they have a hardness gene, which makes them different and untouchable.  Barely out of nappies thinking they are the in thing.  There's a look about them, like a smugness and it makes you feel like getting a baseball bat out and using if for an unintended purpose.  Their behaviour gives the place an awkward feel.  A tension, even though this is perceptual.  Some of them are no doubt bad, most are most probably good.  However, they are all buying into an image and a language.  Yes, a language.  One they hear from music, TV and of a different culture and they adopt it as though it is their language.  It is the new street talk.  It sounds like the ghettos of America.  It is cultural, it relates to a race and group of people who feel the world owes them a living, and also they are bad, they mimic this bad.  It becomes their identity.  When I see and hear white teenage boys acting as if they are from a black, ghetto I see senselessness.  Then wonder whether they want to get a job and work, whether they would go to the interview and talk in the same fashion they are now.  They are unaware, naive of the world and only know their small area.  It seems ignorance is the new in.

What they don't see but I see is the new stupid.  Stupid is what stupid says and does.  The youths are lemmings.  All running towards the cliff edge.  They are creating their own culture when it does not exist.  It seems they want to be downtrodden, they want to act this way because it is their existence.  They are becoming a reality of stupidity.  A reality of a self fulfilling prophecy they see from TV.  The area isn't bad, it isn't so downtrodden it should be downtrodden.  OK this area of London I live in does suffer from poverty, there are social problems, but they are not of epidemic proportions.  Yet the teenagers of this area want it to be an epidemic, they want to make one.  The street and the hood is where their friends are,  it exists because they want it to exist not because it really does exists.  Their full out copying then becomes a real thing.  At which point their pretend fears become real fears.  Real knifes and guns being held.  Real drugs infiltrating what was a relatively secure area.  All because of the school holidays.  This is the world they see young, the space of their birthdays seems to be forever,  they will get older but this is the only moment they see. As if their life will be eternally stuck in the here and now and age is something which will not touch them, because time passing is also inconceivable.

It is sad, frustrating and annoying.  The new good thing is stupid.  It's witnessed when a group of teenagers go walking down the street and in tow is a large pregnant girl.  I wonder if she will be pushing her pram and baby around with her gang, and then for how many days, or weeks.  It is an unfortunate thing.  Teenage girl, pregnant, little education and a stereotype.  Lets not forget to mention they all have frying pan hats, baggy trakky bottoms and badges of ignorance.  Growing up sure will tough for some of them, especially when they find out there's will be more to life.  A little more than the glorification of density.

God help the Queen.