Bill's Notes

Ann Althouse asks.

Now, I can't criticize this, as a 44-year-old bachelor who doesn't have any children. But every once in a while, for at least the past 10 years or so, I've wondered: Whatever happened to the kids? I occasionally see them doing things with their families. But what I don't see is what I had growing up: Neighborhood kids everywhere, playing pickup games of football, or stick-ball in the street, or basketball. I don't see them hanging around.

I know that I was in the last year of the Baby Boomers — born 1963 (64 is technically the last year, but we were all in the same grade). In Hasbrouck Heights and Toms River, at least, there were kids everywhere (especially Heights — virtually ever house had a couple of kids in it, and the houses without kids were known for being a bit unusual. They also had nicer lawns).

Guess I didn't realize I had it so good growing up. Or at least had the opportunity to make it so good. There were four kids on the right side, three kids on the left, six kids behind us, four catty-cornered, and the people with the really nice house and yard on the other catty-corner — their kids were grown up and working. Of course, I managed to find a way to be lonely, but hey, that's not the topic here. (I did remember saying, golly, there's only a few kids in this town when we moved to Toms River, because Heights was overflowing with them.)

Just kids, kids, kids — gobs and gobs of kids. We were everywhere. Outside. Doing all sorts of shit.

Now I go through that neighborhood and all the houses are much better groomed, and there are no kids.

In my neighborhood in Lehighton, well, there are a few youngsters, I think. I see them with their parents. There are a couple of teens running up and down the street on ATVs or dirt bikes, and I love shaking my fist at them and saying in an old man voice, "You kids, get out of my yard!" (LOL). (Actually, I always threaten to put up a clothesline if they make too much noise.)

Now, if you have kids, you've done your part, and I'm not criticizing you or anyone else. I'm just wondering when's the last time you see kids playing baseball or street hockey or stickball in the street?

I could just not be seeing them. Or kid-dom is different now. Perhaps it's all planned out. The so-called "Organization Kid." I don't know.

Instapundit has an interesting discussion of why newspapers are dying: Essentially, they're liberally biased, don't do reporting, and treat the beliefs of a large part of their customer base with contempt.

I would add two more things:

1. Corporate mismanagement. The issue is not just liberal bias -- the lefties have a point, too, about the loss of hard-edge reporting that characterized the best papers. There's been a "Gannett-ization" of newspapers that have made them similar to each other, similar in style, and, frankly, boring. They don't take on the tough issues. They "manage" the news process with an excessively formulaic process.

2. HR practices. Newspapers, especially big-city metro papers, are made up of people who are required to have worked at another paper for five years before coming to the Big One. Result: You get a lot of out-of-towners writing the news, and they don't know the neighborhoods and the people. Also, many are highly educated, and who identify more with their sources than with their readers.

The result, I think, is boring, vanilla, me-too product, contemptuous of most of their readers' beliefs, and without a feel for the local color and rhythms of the town.

Solution: Bring back the no-bullshit, chain-smoking, semi-alcoholic newspaperman with a high school education whose dad was a local cop and whose mom tended the local bar and who's lived in the city his whole life. He'll tell you what's going on. And probably write about it in a far more interesting way.