By Brian J. Karem

If you will indulge me today, I find it hard to be glib or witty.

I am extremely distressed.

It has to do with recent headlines, naturally, but more than that it is a common theme prevalent in these headlines.

Last week we had an exclusive story about two area athletes, one 19 and one 18-years-old. They were arrested and charged in the beating and robbery of a man on the boardwalk in Ocean City.

This week we also have a story in our sister publication about a 19-year-old who was accused of killing a police officer before he was strangled to death in jail.

And then, of course there is the obligatory story of a priest formerly of Germantown who was arrested and charged in an abuse case that goes back to 2001 and involves a 14-year-old child.

For those who are adept at detecting themes and patterns, it cannot escape your attention the relatively young age of the criminals in the first two cases and the victim in the last case.

Teenagers.

In this column before I've written about a man named Doug Jacoby. Doug was a teacher and a friend who recently died after suffering from brain cancer.

He was a very gifted educator who pointed out the obvious: "Parenting is the lost art of our generation."

Doug was so right and every time I think of what he said it makes me exceedingly sad.

In the small space in which I dedicate myself to writing each week I do not have the ability to flesh out all that is wrong with my generation. It would take a book, perhaps even volumes.

Suffice it to say we are spoiled, uninteresting and shallow.

I do not divorce myself from this generation of parents. I am one of them.

My children, thankfully, have grown up with some semblance of common sense and I hope they would never be either the criminals or the victims of which I write.

But I am guilty of spoiling them and making them, if not wholly, at least somewhat unaware of the world as it truly exists.

That is the greatest fault of my generation of parents.

As a coach, educator, parent and reporter I've seen it far too often to joke about.

Fathers treat their children as the byproducts of an amorous fling, ready to be tossed or jettisoned at the drop of a hat, or the shaking of a new skirt to chase.

Mothers are over indulgent and forever excusing their children and their bad behavior. They suffer from prolonged verbal abuse at the hands of their own children with little more than a smile.

Real discipline no longer exists. Parents, perhaps rightly so, are often even afraid of talking about spanking their young children. But I can tell you that a spanking at age five might keep you from having the police visit you when the child is a teen and has no respect for authority.

We were told to question authority as children and we reveled in it. In so doing we also gave up our discipline.

Worse yet, we won't even take responsibility for our actions. We've learned from our mass media that we are a generation of victims and nothing is our fault.

We've swung too far to the left, too far to the right and forgot as the Buddha taught that the middle ground is where we should be.

We've forgotten how to think and how to instill this nature in our children. We're too enamored of Hollywood, and too anxious to become celebrities.

We worship the Brittanies, the Hiltons and whoever else ventures across the landscape and throw away our self-respect in the process. We genuflect at the site of professional athletes, many of who are short steps away from spending time in prison themselves.

Then there are the abusers. They produce more criminals and quite dangerous ones with their venom under the guise of love.

There are so many more things I could say, but I've run out of space.

Unfortunately our children are running out of time and so are we to fix the problems that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.