CD's Are Wrecking Our Kids.

My teenagers are slobs. I suspect your teenagers are slobs too. I blame CD's for this.

Back when I was a kid, we listened to music (and George Carlin) on RECORDS. Record ownership required respect and rules. You took care of the record jacket by keeping them organized in milk crates. If you were very particular, you had individual plastic sleeves to protect the record jacket.

To listen to the record, you pulled the inner sleeve out (careful to not drop any inserts if it was a Pink Floyd album). You held the record gingerly only on it's edge and placed it carefully on the turntable. Prior to playing, you cleaned the record. Then, with the precision of a surgeon, you set the needle on the spinning vinyl.

That kind of diligence carries on in life to your first car, first house, first pacemaker etc.

Over the course of a dating realtionship, couples lend each other sentimantal records. Breaking up always involved retrieving one's albums. This was such an odious process that it was better to stay together that have to divide the collection.

Then along came CD's and they were marketed as virtually indestructible. No care was required to listen to them. Disks could lie around on your bedroom floor, covered in mayonnaise and cat hair, and still play in your DiscMan.

Why should a kid learn about the value of taking care of something when that thing was a Frisbee one minute and playing Foo Fighters the next?

Now music is nothing more than MP3 files on iPods. Not only do kids never touch the songs, most of the time they don't even pay for them. Thanks for contributing to the diminished respect for the law Napster and Limewire.

Today when a couple breaks up, they don't need to return anyone's records. They just delete the songs. And the memories.