Our young men and women have become flabby, listless, shiftless and spoiled.
You don’t have to take my word for it. You have only to watch “House Hunters” on HGTV, where young couples in flip-flops and tank tops tour houses for sale and whine about “outdated” kitchens that don’t look to be more than five years old.
These young people are at the very beginning of their lives, yet they seem to possess no greater ambition than to “kick back” and watch television on gigantic flat-screen TVs.
In tour after tour seen recently on this voyeuristic TV show, the young husbands declare that they simply can’t be happy unless their new home includes a “Man Room” in which they can fraternize with their buddies and play games they enjoyed as little boys.
The women want rooms of their own too, where they can while away their days “scrapbooking.”
Mortgage crisis? Housing shortage? Not on HGTV, where the homes are spacious, many of them are new, and the backyards are huge. But heaven help the realtor if that quarter-acre yard doesn’t have a fence. That’s a dealbreaker for these Jasons and Jennifers who simply must have a great big fenced-in yard for their little doggie!
With their yearnings for two-car garages and finished basements in which to store their cars, pickup trucks, boats and other playthings, these young people seem more like retirees than 20-somethings.
I’m usually the last person to begrudge anyone their piece of the American Dream, but the home-hunting shows on HGTV paint a picture of soulless materialism in which everyone feels entitled to brand-new dishwashers, ovens and washer-dryers, whether they’ve worked a day in their life or not.
It never seems to occur to anyone on “House Hunters” that ripping out a five-year-old kitchen filled with used but well-functioning appliances represents a big waste of time, money and material.
Fascinating though they might be, many of the HGTV shows are celebrations of material excess.
Recently, after an HGTV show ballyhooed a 1,500 square-foot kitchen in a private home that contained seven ovens, I had to conclude that the battle to conserve energy and someday wean ourselves off of foreign energy supplies is probably already lost.