Page 25 - Fire Your Personal Trainer and Kick Your Own Damn Ass

Fire Your Personal Trainer 22
And Kick Your Own Damn Ass

damn (oops) crewcut – my parents did. Hell, I remember my father
shaving my head in our basement with those f-ing electric clippers and
laughing while I begged both my parents to let me grow my hair out.

I went to junior high with knots in my stomach every day. Some of the
kids were out of control and no one did anything. I remember their
names to this day even though they weren’t even in any of my classes.
And that includes the kid who slapped me across the face. The bullying

that went on was awful and make no mistake, it was swept under the
rug big time by the parents of the baby boomers. You might assume
that since this was the era of peace, love and understanding, things like
this didn’t happen. Ha!

No one confronted it or talked about it. The parents of the boomers
were very, very weird in their own right. The community I lived in was
built around 1960 and the majority of people that moved there came

from Brooklyn or Queens. They were not born or raised in the suburbs.
Those suburbs out in the “country” were all brand new. And they brought
attitudes and ideas with them that they had learned on the streets of
NYC. “Fight your own battles,” “be a man,” “stand up for yourself,” and
the biggest lie of all: “if you face up to a bully he’ll back down,” were
the standard clichés of the day. Yeah, right. Like that worked with these
kids. With some of them it worked, and some of them . . . not at all!

You might ask yourself, if this was so prevalent during the days that the
baby boomers were growing up, why didn’t they put an end to it when
they became adults? If the boomers are supposed to be so enlightened,
why did it persist for so long and why is it still with us to such a degree?
Darn good questions! And younger people who view the boomers and
their mega-egos with skepticism have a right to.