Dear Old Folk of the World,

I hear you are annoyed with young people's sense of entitlement. We take everything for granted and feel everything we receive is owed us. Well, I am here to inform you that we have taken your criticism into consideration and are trying to be more like you, but it will take a lot of years.

For instance, Social Security. We must admit, we do feel entitled to some kind of safety net in our golden years. Even though we have contributed a big chunk of our personal incomes toward this black hole from whence your bingo money comes, in all likelihood we're shit out of luck there. We would love to have a big, powerful lobby group with lots of money working to secure our senior income, but the AARP says we can't join until we're 55.

In the meantime, people keep voting for a president who has turned our surplus (read, Social Security money for our generation) into a deficit. But I'm sure you old folks all voted for Kerry, because certainly you don't feel entitled to profit more from your stock portfolios, or to tell other people how to live their lives.

And don't worry, we are expecting less and less with each passing day that we will be able to buy groceries and Depends when we are old.

Then there's the parking lot. I realize that we should be crossing the parking lot 10 feet away from the crosswalk, moseying down the center of the lane and refusing to move over for vehicle traffic. But selfishly, we adhere to the parking-lot law of the young (pedestrians are illegal to hit with your car, but should use crosswalks instead of treating the lot like their own personal boardwalk).

It is just so hard to give up that sense that we're entitled to drive three feet without nearly hitting a random wanderer, but we are working on it. And I am sure that in 30 or 40 more years, we will all have the art of aimlessly shuffling through parking-lot traffic down pat. And by then, we will all be driving Buicks. Very. Slowly.

Speaking of traffic, we are also working on that going-the-speed-limit thing. It is just so hard to go 20 under when you weigh more than 90 pounds soaking wet. We realize we don't have the right to go anywhere close to the speed limit, and that is why you wise elderly people pace each other in both lanes, refusing to let anyone even approach the speed limit. Hopefully, one day there will be people who are paid to enforce speed limits -- in essense, to "police" traffic -- but until then, thanks!!

Our selfish insistence on approaching the speed limit is something we apologize for, but, owing to our youthfulness and inexperience, we feel it can only be remedied by time, weight loss, heavy medication, blindness, dementia and possibly orthopedic shoes.

Now, having worked some as a teen in retail and hospitality, I realize, as you do, that those whippersnapper cashiers and waitstaff -- more so than anyone -- must be stripped of that smug sense of entitlement. Here they are in these cushy, well-respected jobs, which your average, underappreciated, worked-to-the-bone Wal-Mart people greeter would kill for.

How dare these people sneer upon long-expired double coupons from other stores? How dare they change the sales every week? And what nerve, making you wait five minutes for your coffee while they wait on (gasp!) other tables! And how appalling that these lucky kids, who are getting $2.13 an hour, expect to pad their wallets further by asking for tips when your bacon was not made to your unspecified degree of crispiness and the salad had iceberg lettuce in it (put there, no doubt, by that very server, who likely pocketed the good lettuce to sell later on the black market).

Yes, those haughty cashiers and waitstaff have lived it up for far too long. They must pay for their smug sense of entitlement! And don't worry, the older we get, the worse the service gets. Pretty soon, we'll have the moral conviction and the courage to scream helpful expletives at them and demand their immediate termination, too.

And as for those pimply-faced pharmacy techs who sell us those overpriced medications, well, we should start giving them a piece of our minds, too. And we will, as soon as we're old enough to possibly keel over from a mere Vioxx pill and our bereaved spouses can sue for exorbitant amounts of money (because no one should be cut down in the prime of their retirement).

And finally, there is the issue of entertainment. As you may know, we young peope feel entitled to watch sinful and/or stupid television shows. While we do enjoy the inanity that is "Scrubs" and the irredeemable sleaze that is "The Family Guy," we realize that the TV is meant for watching wholesome, quality fare such as "Wheel of Fortune" and "Matlock" reruns.

We realize that women like those on "Sex and the City" should not get any airtime unless they were killed by one of their johns and Dick Van Dyke and his son are investigating their murder for a friend. We realize that there is no redeeming value to "The Simpsons" and that it is not funny and offers no valuable commentary on society like the show "Doc" (starring that guy who sang "Achy Breaky Heart") or "Perry Mason." Fortunately, as we young people don't have the spare time(and never will, thanks to the impending demise of Social Security) to write letters to the FCC about Angel's gyrating hips, I am sure that the airwaves soon will be purged of racy smut such as "Gilmore Girls" and "Alias" and will be filled with wholesome fare like "Murder She Wrote" and several episodes of "The Price is Right" per day.

Really, we apologize not only for being so egregiously self-centered and self-entitled, but for our very existence.

We will try to improve ourselves. As for me, I'm doing my best by wandering aimlessly through grocery-store aisles, casting disapproving glares at the herds of teen-agers in the mall, and watching the occasional episode of "Jeopardy."

Keep on doing what you're doing, you non-entitled-feeling old folks, you!

Much love,

Heather

Let me preface this post by saying I feel very sorry for any kids Michael Jackson molested (if the allegations are true). In an ideal world, there would be no pedophiles. And in an almost-perfect world, pedophiles would be buried in dirt with their faces and naughty bits exposed, have the aforementioned parts of their anatomy smeared in honey, and then would be left to feel the wrath of hordes of carnivorous insects. Afterwards, their wounds would be soothed with liquid waste before their confinement in a 2-foot-by-2-foot hole to die from starvation, exposure or infection.

Alas, in this imperfect world in which I am not allowed to violate the human rights of accused criminals, it is a fact of life that pedophiles roam the streets (and possibly VH1's "I Love the '80s"). And because most of us know that the world is full of creepy people, the parents of the children Michael Jackson may or may not have molested are getting zero sympathy from me.

Now perhaps the parents of the accusers in the early '90s cases -- which happened before being nose-free became synonymous with sharing your bed with children -- can sleep well at night, knowing that they didn't allow their kids to spend weeks unsupervised at the ranch of a weird recluse around whom swirled allegations of pedophilia. But the parents who let the surgically-altered singer have access to their children after the allegations were levied are just as guilty as Jackson is believed to be. Whether they were just after free child care or a brush with celebrity, or were deliberately pimping their kids out in hopes of a nice, big settlement at the expense of their sons' innocence, these parents should be right there with the pedophiles in my human anthill experiment.

But even the parents who had no reason to believe Jacko was anything other than a nice, normal, surgically-altered hermit who preferred the company of children over that of adults should have known better.

When I was little, my parents didn't just rely on the listings of local sex offenders to keep me safe from predators. They also kept me away from the creepy guy at church who passed out candy to the kiddies. They didn't let me play in the yard of the weird dad who liked wrestling with neighborhood young'uns. In fact, they didn't let my brothers or me play in the yard of anyone they hadn't spent some time with and approved as an OK person.

If your average thinking person is squeamish about letting the kids talk to some old dude at church who has done nothing weird other than giving kids candy and pinching their cheeks, then WHAT ON EARTH would possess a parent to hand their kids over to a 30-something man who not only thinks he IS a kid and spends most of his time with young boys (hello, I'd like you to meet my friend, the red flag), but also wears epaulets, has a Peter Pan complex, has been surgically altered to look like the demon spawn of Barbie and that animal from "Neverending Story," and to the best of everyone's knowledge has never had a conversation with an adult (other than to tell said adult, in a childish whisper, how much he loves children)???!!!!!

Whether he is innocent or guilty, one thing is certain. There are enough not-very-insignificant things wrong with this picture that any rational parent who is not a pimp should know to keep the kiddies away from this man. Sure, it's OK for kids to socialize with adults, but not alone and not for weeks on end, and certainly not with adults who make a habit of socializing almost exclusively with children, especially if it's primarily with children of a specific gender and age. It's hard enough to know whether any older person is going to molest a kid, but a situation like this should be a no-brainer.

I hope none of those parents get any money. I hope the ones that got money have it taken away. And I hope all the parents who let their kids have sleepovers with a middle-aged guy who -- let's face it -- is a few bricks shy of a load not only don't profit from the experience, but are charged with child endangerment. And, although again I am asking for a perfect world, I hope they're eaten alive by army ants.

As to whether Jacko really is a pedophile, we may never know. He may just be a really weird dude whose only crime is doing things that look bad (although I have to say it looks quite bad indeed when your little playmates' fingerprints are found all over your porn stash). But the fact that the parents of his young pals were unforgivably negligent is immutable, given the creepy and bizarre circumstances. Greed and stupidity aren't crimes, but they certainly should be.

And the award for biggest bitch in the world goes to ... the woman who sued two neighborhood girls for baking her some cookies.