The Kids Are Alright

6/10/2025 2:15 PM

NBC. Getty Images.

One of the most notable changes that social media has brought about since its inception is the alteration of the word "friend."

When I was 5, I had 10 friends.

When I was 15, I accumulated maybe 30 or 40 more.

In college, and then after entering the business world, that number grew into the hundreds, but was still manageable.

Then Facebook happened… And that number grew into the thousands.

Then Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok happened… And that number grew even further… Kinda.

Collectively, I have around 250,000 friends/followers at this moment… A minuscule number compared to some of the freaks I work with… And I finally threw the word "followers" in there to make the point that even though my "friend" group has grown exponentially, I am still closer with the 10 people I knew in Kindergarten than the quarter of a million people I post pictures and memes to everyday in my desperate attempt for attention.

Giphy Images.

Anyhoo… What was the point I was about to make?

Oh, yeah.

Out of that myriad of semi-friends, I have a smaller subset of followers who send me DMs regularly.

Most of them send either food recommendations, inappropriate jokes, or pictures of their genitals, and every now and again I'll click on their messages to get inspiration (or to masturbate to strangers' dicks).

Today, I got a story from a gentleman I have never met, but chat with quite often, Tommy Salami, whose nom de plume suggests he's a 'sends-dick-pics-guy', but he is not… At least not to me. And the DM contained a story from a couple of weeks ago that I totally missed, and I wanted to escalate a touch more through this blog.

I complain so much about what this world has turned into (only because I believe that most of the people alive today are total fucking disgraces) that I sometimes miss all of the EXTRAORDINARY stuff people are still doing every second of every day all over this cursed planet. And one such story is this…

These kids are not donating bone marrow or pulling babies out of burning buildings. They are simply showing some reverence for people they have never met who have passed away after serving our country in some respect, and whose graves have been all-but-forgotten… And I fucking LOVE them for it.

People like me often sit on our high horses and throw metaphorical stones at the mindless protesters who are throwing genuine stones for causes they don't fully understand, and that shifts our focus away from kids like this. Kids who want to show respect for the generations that came before them, and also be part of something that matters.

They won't be celebrated outside of some local news story or mindless blog, but they'll be better people than the handful that decided not to help out because they wanted to finish binge-watching the new season of TIRES on Netflix.