Crack:”You asked me what made me "so cross" in my first post?....you see there you have it,...you really didn`t make any effort to understand exactly what I was saying! “

Do you want a slapping? Raise your voice or answer back one more time and by god you’ll get what for.

The Pied Piper: "Do you want a slapping?"

That would be the first OLO post that made me laugh out loud.

O tempora! O mores!

Cicero was whining about the declining morals and social norms nearly 2,000 years ago. I'm guessing the Rome of his youth was a particularly upright and moral society, then, because we have apparently been in a steady decline since then.

We can all remember how much safer, how much cleaner, how much politer society once was. Hell, I'm 26 and I can remember 'better days'. The problem is, we tend to ignore the good and observe the bad. Vandalism is not, as Crackcup suggested, "the acceptable norm today". The vast majority of kids I work with, at a high school of ill-repute, have never vandalised a thing in their lives. They don't rape people or bash them, either. I ride my bike late at night on a regular basis, sometimes returning home well after midnight, and have never felt unsafe or been attacked.

I think the real issue is that we have access to more information. Every time someone DOES get attacked while walking home at night, we all hear about it. If we hear about it twice in one month, it becomes an "epidemic" of crime, and we shake our heads at the unruly youth. I suspect that youth have always been unruly and always will be. Smack 'em by all means, but don't assume that by not smacking them you are endangering our way of life.

Those hoodlums are the children everyone ignored until they did become street kids and then they complained about them.

Now that's a load!

The parents ignored them while pissing it up at the local or gambling away their welfare cheques in many cases.

Trouble is, they, the parents are simply 'not accountable'. Meanwhile the 'do-gooders' have set about making the world a worse place for all concerned.

Take away welfare payments from parents with wayward kids.

No school, no cash!

Stop paying loosers to have more loosers!

Bring back national service. They can either be learning, earning or serving the needs of our defence forces. After all, we have highly trained service personel washing dishes, collecting garbage and scrubbing floors.

Meanwhile kids in detention cost tens of thousands each year to house, feed and entertain, all in the name of reabilitation.

Things at their disposal like play stations, pool tables, probobly foxtel for all we know. It's a joke, essecially when we have well behaved kids who do the right thing, attend schools and go hungry becasue our system would rather feed wayward kids than provide meals at schools for the decent ones.

The whole system is up side down!

We need some balls in governments, on both sides of the fence and stop paying so much attention to these do-gooders!

The real cause of this epidemic is is another epidemic. The flood of (academic) non-sensical do-gooders head the list. Another one is the insanity of television's mindless programming. Just look at national (yes, the nr 1 broadcaster of the country) TV every morning & weekends. Idiotic cartoons, that incomprehensibly stupid Play School, Rage goes non-stop & is being watched by morons who via a legal loop hole are allowed to have children. And then there is saturation sport coverage which totally prevents an intelligent youngster to watch & learn anything from a medium designed to be a source of information. Source alright ! Source of idiocy ! What hope do youngsters have to set themselves goals ? Their chances are on par of first home buyers. i.e. zilch ! What causes this epidemic ? Well, I've watched it developing & my conclusion is that the cause of it is the laxing of standards such as we see in the education system, law & oder & extremely poor quality of entertainment. And, of course, the everpresent over regulation of our daily lives. So, to all you social & economic "experts", next time some dill-witted reporter asks your comments please do society a favour & decline.

Individual:
You nailed it in one, and it is heartening to see that we do have a couple of people out there in this pseudo-yankee WallyWorld Wonderland, who can see reason through all this contrary self-righteous posturing by these 'do-gooders' who themselves cannot see the wood for the trees!

I can fully understand why society world-wide is degenerating at a rapid rate ....the answer is there in print from all the majority of "nay-sayers" who have contributed to this thread! This is the world that you want?....well believe me you are going to get exactly what you deserve in the years ahead, and then no doubt we will have listen to the bleating from you all when reality finally dawns and you are then looking for somebody else to blame!

I cannot understand how you people have managed to interpret my message as "beat the crap out of the child!".....I said that we need to exercise more control and mete out punishment to suit the crime! By the sound of you lot, your answer to the problem is to reward wayward children with a pat on the back and encourage more of it whilst blaming the elderly for being too strict and demanding whilst expecting too much responsibilty,...you lot in fact are the "do-gooders" in this highly emotive issue!