• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

If these parents can afford an overpriced vacation for themselves and their four children and the nanny during the holidays, maybe they could put their money to better use. How about paying more taxes? Maybe their taxes need to be raised a little. Is this why we refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy? So they have enough money to let their bratty little kids soak up the Costa Rican sun? Really? Fuck them.

Too harsh, you think? So, we all should just say: “Fuck the infrastructure”? “Fuck the returning soldier”? “Fuck the emergency we can’t imagine. Just pass the tanning butter”? I say fuck that.

I can hear you now: “But, Lewis, you’re enjoying a vacation, too. Aren’t you lounging in the tropical sun?”

I know, I know. And I admit I feel a little guilty about being here by myself. But I also think that the government needs to raise my taxes so I don’t go to these places and therefore don’t feel guilty.

All I’m saying is at times like these, you can tax the rich a little more.

Don’t cry. I said a little. God knows you wouldn’t want to take too much from the rich because even though they’d still be rich, they wouldn’t be as rich. And maybe they’d have to stay home at Thanksgiving with the kids, instead of unleashing them on me.

Look, I don’t mean to be unduly rude, but I have to be. I have been left with no choice. Thanksgiving isn’t a family time for me—so much so that I literally flee the country. And I really, really don’t want to spend my few days of peace with yours.

This type of holiday family gathering at a tropical resort was once the province of only the superrich. We are talking the Astors. The Fricks. The Kennedys, the Fords, the Hoodahaddahs, and the Honorable Their-ShitNeverSmells. All the big families of note.

The reason they went off for the holidays was so that they could all gather together and count their money with families of like social status and make sure they married within their class, their very upper upper class. This assured that they kept all the money to themselves. These vacations were a way to introduce their children to the entitlement they felt they so richly deserved.

Okay, maybe I exaggerate here, but just a little.

But these kids in Costa Rica with me are not Fricks or Fords or Hoodahaddahs. And as they sit on the beach before me, taking a vacation like this, sucking on the little coconut-mango smoothies the hotel staff passes around when the sun is at its peak, I can’t help wondering what this kind of extraordinary experience is going to do to their young minds. What the fuck are they going to expect as adults?

I understand it’s not their fault that their parents are wealthy, self-indulgent idiots who don’t want their child suffering the indignities of a Holiday Inn off the interstate the way they had to when they were kids.

So when I look at the children frolicking in the spectacularly blue ocean in front of me, I am not looking at America’s future. I am seeing tomorrow’s basket cases, the people who’ll have changed their names to Tush-Tush or Kumsquatch or Poached in order to stand out from the crowd and who will never be noticed for their talents or accomplishments but for their massively narcissistic egos. I am looking at the next generation’s Paris Hiltons and Kardashian kids and the motley collection of morons from whatever new reality shows are going to induce nausea in me in the future.

Of course, every one of these kids scampering across the sandy beach won’t end up like them, but I can guarantee that a lot of them will. We are spawning another generation that feels that the world around them exists only for the sake of their own egos. Egos that grow like a rapidly advancing cancer, that will engulf and consume us in whatever medium is the next carrier of the images that surround us. These are the egos that will create tomorrow’s world; and, sadly, these are the egos that will believe they are more important than the world in which they exist.

“Jesus, that’s bleak,” you think. “It can’t be that bad, Lewis. Besides, who are you to be standing in judgment of these people?