Kids will be kids, but they can change the world
Seriously, kids? While thousands of you marched for your lives, advocating for sensible gun laws and for lawmakers to come to their senses, others of your generation were apparently busy reminding us old fogies that not every teen is out there trying to save the world.
Which is to say that some kids still say and do the darnedest, dumbest things because, well, they’re kids.
The latest in youthful inanity requires a condom, which right there strikes fear in the hearts of most parents. Said condom is placed not where you might expect but into a nostril, where
it is inhaled with enough vigor so as to suck up the entire condom, thus allowing it to slide through the pharynx and re-emerge through the mouth where it can be plucked out like a rejected piece of wilted kale before it can continue on to the stomach or, more dangerously, toward the lungs.
The latter itinerary can cause the worst sinus infection imaginable, choking, suffocation or even death, because, yes, kids are not invincible and bullets are not the only way they die.
Fortunately, I could find no reports of anybody succumbing during the Condom Snorting Challenge, as it is called.
The challenge appears to have blown in last fall — although it has been mentioned as far back as 2013 — but has gone viral in recent days, with videos surfacing on social media and with stories appearing in Newsweek, The Washington Post and USA Today and on CBS News and Fox News and elsewhere. This condom challenge is not to be mistaken for the condom challenge circa 2015 in which the prophylactic is filled with liquid and tied off like a big water balloon then dumped upon the head of a willing participant. The balloon flops over the face like a giant silicone breast implant. Why? No earthly good reason.
As a parent who survived the raising of six children through their teen years, I have seen my share of idiotic behaviors. In 2012, I wrote about how my darling daughter, then 16, and her high school friends accepted the Cinnamon Challenge, which as its name implies requires the participant to eat a heaping spoonful of the spice to see whether it stays down or is violently upchucked in a billowing brown haze suitable for YouTube.
Thousands of videos made it onto social media then. And thousands of kids were warned that ingesting cinnamon can be dangerous if the brown cloud wafts its way down into the lungs.
When I asked my daughter what inspired her and her friends to ingest cinnamon and then videotape this dubious endeavor — the broadcasting of such feats being integral to the challenge — she replied they did so because they were “awesome,” which was not the word that came to my mind.
“I mean, who doesn’t love a challenge, Mother?” she asked.
I reminded her that I raised six children, so I know what a challenge is.
Thankfully, my kids were too old — dare I say too wise? — to partake in a challenge that was in vogue earlier this year, this one involving munching on colorful and caustic Tide Pods. It’s literally like washing your own mouth out with soap and then eating the soap. Ah, youth. But wait. Before we accept such ridiculous challenges as proof that ALL youths are ALWAYS too immature, too naive, too uninformed, too reckless and too silly to be taken seriously — and I know some of you folks angry over the kid-driven March for Our Lives and #NeverAgain movement for safer, saner gun laws are dying to do just that — consider this:
It has ever been thus. Wacky stunts are a rite of passage. Long before condom snorting, we old fogies in our youth went streaking. We guzzled goldfish, stuffed ourselves with friends into phone booths, sat on flagpoles, marathon danced, panty raided. Yet we turned out all right — most of us, anyway.
Consider also that New York magazine hip youth maven Madison Malone Kircher suggests that the condom-snorting challenge is old news, or, really, no news at all. What has actually gone viral, she writes, is not the gag but the hysteria over the gag — the stories, not the substance or the snorting.
What has also always been thus is this: Throughout history, student activists have been powerful agents of social change. Youths played a major role in the civil rights movement. They were front and center in the protests against the Vietnam War. They are awesome.
We adults teach them, but we also learn from them. We remind them that they are not invincible — and thus should use condoms and cinnamon as intended — but they are also not invisible.
Kids will be kids, yes. They can be reckless and feckless and wrong — and so can we old fogies. They are also often smart, savvy, wise and worthy of our attention. They can change the world, and they should, since it is theirs to inherit. Seriously.