I know many adults are struggling to understand why teenagers across the country are chewing on laundry detergent pods.
I believe I can bring some clarity to this question:
It’s because they’re morons.
I do not say that to be insulting. I say it because: A) I was a teenage boy once, and B) I have raised three teenagers, two of them boys.
So I know whereof I speak.
In my experience, boys are far dumber than girls, who tend to reserve their teenage stupidity for random acts of meanness against other girls they feel competitive with. (Ladies, correct me here if I have that wrong. But the worst I can remember my daughter Annie doing was gossiping darkly about the girls on the cheerleading squad.)
Boys on the other hand tend to do intentionally stupid stuff to get attention or because they think it’s going to be funny. You can always tell a boy is going to do something exceptionally idiotic when it’s preceded by the words, “Watch this …!”
In my case, I once got caught pegging crab apples at cars with my pals Mike, Pat, and Jig. We were quite the gang of thugs. As I recall, I hid in tall grass about 20 yards back from the road with Pat while Mike and Jig were in the branches of a tree overhanging the road. The idea was to hit the car from the side and the top, which seemed like absolute genius to us at the time – I mean, the side AND the top, can you imagine how cool?
Anyway, we nailed a couple of cars before the entire city police force showed up, this being a major, major event in a town like Escanaba, a veritable crime wave. I ended up getting a stern lecture at the police station about how lobbing crab apple grenades was a gateway to a life of crime.
I honestly don’t remember why we decided denting cars with crab apples would be a great and adventurous way to kill an afternoon. And from the perch of adulthood I am damned sure I’d view an apple attack on my car as evidence that society is falling apart.
But the truth is it just seemed like the thing to do at the moment. Teenagers do stupid stuff. That’s really all there is to it.
The type and degree of stupidity, I think, varies by generation. For instance, when I was a kid we wouldn’t have eaten laundry detergent because our parents (aka “homicidal Nazis”) intentionally made us eat soap if we swore or lied. It was called “cleaning your mouth out.” My parents favored Zest. I still can’t use it to this day.
I do think today’s teens and young adults have drifted toward more self-destructive stupidity, and that’s rightly got people concerned. We can search all we want for the deep, dark, sociological or psychological reasons behind the Tide pod phenomenon. And the cinnamon craze before that. And the gallon challenge before that. (What is it with this generation and ingesting stuff?) But in end, teens do stupid things because teenagers are stupid. It’s kinda that simple. You just gotta hope they survive to become adults who shake their head at the dumb things teenagers do.
Now, to end this column on a positive note, I spotted a meme that made me laugh. It said: “Hey, teenagers, here’s the real Tide pod challenge: put it in the washer and do some damn laundry for a change.”
Now there’s a pod challenge I highly endorse.
Image credit: Mike Mozart
Right on target Andy! The crab apple story reminded me of the night (as a teenager) my buddies talked me into snow balling cars. He tagged a sweet Grand Am and they pulled off and started to chase after us. I got away, another friend hid, and the third guy got caught in yet another friend’s garage. Fortunately for him the friend’s dad who’s garage it was chased the victims off and protected him. That was enough of that stuff for me.
Now, how will your trolls make this into something political?
Any time now.
Great column, Andy. As I was once a teenage boy, of course I knew everything there was to know. It wasn’t long after I left the teen years that I discovered just how wrong I was. Many stupid things were done in the name of being funny.
Sorry, no politics!
Eating Tide Pods = law of natural selection?
One Halloween several us decided it would be a great joke to tip over an outhouse a a local lake. Now, we didn’t just push it over. We carefully pushed it over and even placed a couple of straw bales in front of it so we wouldn’t damage the roof. Imagine our surprise the next day when we heard the outhouse had caught fire and burned. In our defense, we had never before known of a privy that was wired for electric lights.
It can also be called “cleaning the gene pool” or “bleaching the gene pool”. There a couple of other names for it, but 2 are enough. After all the Tide Pods look like candy. Anything looking like candy should not be bad for you.
Who started it? More than likely someone on the internet thought it would be “fun” to see how many ignorant morons they could do the dangerous stunt.
For the love of irony…. What embedded advertisement comes up in this article?
Tide Pods Ad
Never let it be said that internet algorithms have no sense of humor!
While it is a salient point that Andrew is wondering why teenagers are doing the tide pods idiocy challenge, he unforunately misses a more serious aspect of tide pods.
That is a number of small children under the age of 8 are eating the tide pods because they look like candy. That is even a bigger concern that some idiot teenagers deliberately eating them. I do not know how many children have been poisoned by the tide pods.
The Tide response “parents make sure that you put the pods beyond the reach of children”.
My opinion is that the makers of Tide should change the packaging and coloring on the pods to reduce the chances that children will eat them.
That is what Andrew should focus in on. If teenagers are too stupid to realize that tide pods can be fatal if they eat them, then they can spend the rest of their lives wondering why they did the act.
NH. Ned tlo change that somehow, the disfigured will whine and cry that they need the government to take care of them for the rest of their miserable lives.
Wow this brought back almost identical memories….
Hiding about 20 feet off the road throwing snowballs at cars with my brothers. Only to realize a fraction of a second too late that the last one was a police car. Of course, in our panic, we high tailed it back home and tried to act like nothing happened, but I’m not sure our Dad was buying it. Then about 2 minutes later there was knock on the door from the very same police that we had just ‘nailed’. Our Dad was a former police officer, and had the talk with the officer at the door, and then we had a talk with him. He had this calm demeanor about him during these types of situations. We never did that again.
Oh yea….I still can’t use Dove soap to this day 50+ years later.