Opinion: Kids these days spending too much time outdoors

Guest Writer Johan Van Eksteen is back once more, folks, with those blistering words of truth and power that move whole crowds to cheers and tears. This time, he’s stumbled upon a very disturbing modern trend that every parent should be very, very concerned about indeed.

Dear Readers, I think I’m finally getting old. This weekend, sitting at home with the curtains drawn so that the bright sun and rolling verdant pastures in front of the ocean by my summer house don’t cause a glare in my 24-inch plasma, I heard a strange, strange noise. Cracking the windows and looking – eugh – outside, I eventually managed to choke down my Gollum-esque sun-hissing long enough to see a truly shocking, disturbing sight.

Children going outside, making forts, playing games and climbing trees.

Seriously, WTF is this kak?

When I was a kid we never had such luxuries. We had to be content to sit indoors all day, staring for hours at a time at a flickering screen, our necks craning downwards into glowing screens. Hell, if I even so much as mentioned spending a few wasted minutes out in the sun and air, my parents would have given me the most massive hiding, or at least left a downvote on my Reddit post.

And yet those were special days. Who could ever forget the magic of getting your first 30 likes on one post? Which of us don’t warmly cherish all the lols and rofls we had with our family? These are the things that make childhood the magical period of innocence and wonder and reposting it is.

All this gambolling and frolicking can’t be good for you: in fact, I think it could be destroying this country’s morals. There is so much life happening in the palms of our hands, and there they all are: outside, breathing in pollen-heavy, insect-infested air in the garden. God, yesterday I had to confiscate their soccer ball and then send them to their rooms with the door locked and shades drawn just so they’d say a perfunctory ‘lol’ to the memes I posted on their walls.

Nature:  a truly revolting, dangerous wasteland brimming
with spiders, disease and all kinds of horrors.

How are you supposed to make friends without adding them online? We need to do something to stop this scourge on our children’s innocence and wonder before it kills it altogether. How will our children ever be able to cherish these special, magical moments without a selfie or status that gets 23 likes and 15 comments in just 15 minutes?

Worst yet are these insufferable books they’re constantly reading. You look up from your iPad at the dinner table and the little vacuous snots have it right on their lap – they can barely go two minutes without looking down at it. And it’s not even a goddamn Kindle; what could be so interesting about paper and ink anyway? It seems that every two seconds I’m telling my kids “geez, Frikkie and Johan Junior, put that bloody thing away”.

We need to take a stand: these balls and games and frolicking in the untouched splendour are creating a generation of hyper-active, anti-social-network loners who don’t even once take part in conversation with their friends and followers; and all the while their iPads and Gameboys and Playstation 4s and Facebook accounts gather dust, forgotten and unappreciated.

In fact, I could go one step further and say that these so-called “physical sports” are warping our kids’ brains and teaching them to be violent. Every day, after my daily stress-unwinding LAN session of ThroatSlit MurderKings 5 I sit back in creeping, overwhelming terror and think about how my kids might be outside, rugby tackling each other, stomping on each other’s’ fingers and hands in that “ruck” thing, or sitting in giant stadiums at school yelling blood-thirsty war-cries at another bunch of kids whose only difference is that they go to some other school.

I know that my own grandparents thought I was spending “too much blerrie time on that blerrie computer thing”, but this is obviously a totally different situation. If we do nothing, we stand to pay the worst price of all: we could end up with a generation of children who think that they should empathise and try to understand that their own children might have their own personal interests and passions that are vastly different to theirs.

Or – God forbid the thought – that they shouldn’t tell their kids to do something just because they did it for years on end. What kind of mad, insane world might that be?

Johan is a guest columnist at Muse and Abuse. Widely renowned for his non-nonsense approach to controversial topics, Johan shines a blinding light of truth on subjects like the hideous scourge of immigration, why white people should vote ANC, why Blackface isn't the real racist problem in SA, and how Black Privilege is an ugly truth that no one wants to admit. He also thinks gay marriage should have been outlawed years ago.

Scientists discover new species to force into extinction

The scientific community is all atwitter today, after a small group of intrepid explorers and adventurers working in the Amazon delta discovered a new species for humankind to slowly but inevitably force into extinction.

“It’s amazing,” said leader of the French and German led expedition, Klein Match-Aange. “To be a part of the ceaseless quest to expand our knowledge of the world’s soon-to-be-naught-but-a-distant-memory-and-a-picture-in-a-yellowing-history-book species is a privilege that can we barely describe.”

The animal is reportedly a “very rare” but “equally delicate and vulnerable” sub species of distant cousins the once plentiful Howling Silver-top Lemur, which not so long ago freely roamed the extensive cattle farms and slashed-and-burned corn fields of the Amazon Farmlands.

“This little guy – which we’ve called the Blue-tipped Howling Lemur, or Marsuplius Genocidus Extinctia - is a shy, shy creature,” explained Match-Aange, recalling the difficult task of finding the elusive ‘Blue Ghost’. “Nocturnal and very skittish, finding him was a real challenge. You won’t believe how many trees we had to cut down just to get a pic of him. All that foliage, dense undergrowth and rare orchids make modern scientific endeavours like these a real nightmare.”

Our knowledge of these elusive creatures, however, is now vastly improved.

“According to preliminary scientific observations on the animal, we can say that it’s not very different from other classic species of lemur,” said the team’s sixty-page report. “While looking somewhat different to other species in this genus, it shares a very similar diet, social behaviourisms, mating habits and vulnerability to stab wounds as its other lemur brethren.”

The report added that this “probably mean[t] a shared similarity in terms of organisational hierarchy, territorial behaviour and susceptibility to broken bones, third-degree burns and bleach poisoning.”

“Whatever their exact species, these animals tend to share a few fundamental characteristics,” the report explained, “such as how thin and easily crushable its skull is, how - much like other lemurs, small apes and some similar species of exotic cats - it dies after only one or two well-aimed 9mm slugs to the back of the head, or how valuable its bones and fur are on the traditional medicines and exotic goods black markets.”

This species of lemur is now the third animal to be added this year to our list of species we’re going to utterly eradicate one by one from the surface of the planet, just after the Java Tiger (Leo Pantherus Coati Expensivus) and the White Rhino (Bohne Maykmii Erectus).

"We're a tenacious bunch, us humans, but we need to keep up the hard work," said the report. "Even now, there are probably hundreds of rare, undiscovered species out there just waiting to be decimated into total disappearance."

Pic: by Rachel Kramer licenced under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Game reserves now totally safe

South African Nature Reserve tourists can visit our nation’s game parks in guaranteed peace now, after national Wildlife Conservation Authority SAWCA has announced that all these rustic national relaxation centres are “totally free of dangerous and wild animals.”

“Once upon a time, you couldn’t even move around freely in these beautiful and secluded parks,” said program manager Jerry Cull who yesterday confirmed the beheading and incineration of the last potentially dangerous lion in South Africa. “Because of all the vicious and dangerous animals, you couldn’t get out of your car and walk around safely, and if you had food on you, like a pocket of oranges or some delicious fruit, you had to wrap it in clingfilm and hide it in a scent-eliminating Tupperware box at the bottom of a mine shaft.”

Thankfully, says Culls, that is all in the past.

“These fenced areas used to be filled with all manner of dangerous and savage beasts: elephants, hippos, buffalo, lions, cheetahs, leopards, hyenas and the vicious and deadly African Honey Badger,” he said gesturing to the mountain of bones erected in honour of SAWCA's accomplishments. “Not any more. Now visitors can roam the waterholes and tree-filled savannah unmolested.”

Culls told of how the program had been a decades long-effort.

“We’ve been working for a number of years now to cut down on the number of wild, ferocious and dangerous animals in the world. We erected concentration camps, er, sorry, zoos, and fenced enclosures so that we’d have them all trapped in one place when we started.”

However, they soon realised it wasn’t enough.

“We thought they’d starve to death in these small enclosures, but their numbers started actually improving. We knew something had to be done.”

Culls immediately started bringing in poor locals and struggling immigrants to help in an unofficial program known only as the Program Of Accurate Culling of Herds.

“These POACH members were magnificent and efficient. With a few well-placed lies to the Asians about how animal parts are like biological Viagra, we got rid of the animals like that.”

Though this program has been met with widespread praise and approval, it still fights against completely contrasting programs overseas, such as in the US, where they have started a program to save their last eagle, Bob, and the UK, where they have begun a national initiative called the Save Whatever Is Left campaign.

“Foreigners think that animals are some sort of representation or symbol of the wild savagery and untamed nobility of a Dark and Forgotten land,” said Culls, cleaning the blood and brain matter off his 7.62mm M134 chaingun, “but honestly, have you even seen a Buffalo? It might look peaceful and majestic, standing in the golden light of the dazzling African sun, ruminating slowly and calmly on the undisturbed tranquility of the Sub-Saharan savannah, but we all know that that murderous, psychopathic shitbag would stick his curly, hard horns through us given even half a chance."

However, game parks remain unsettling and unwelcoming places for human beings, and citizens still demand much change before they will flock to bask in nature's breathtaking tranquility and ambiance.

"We're working on the problem day and night - well, mostly just day, really, between 9 and 5, with an hour for lunch and intermittent smoke breaks," said Game Reserve Conversion Manage Deacon Strukshun. "With our planned night clubs, restaurant chains, foodcourts, multi-storey parking, always-on wifi, and massive luxury strip mall to be added to the parks, we hope that by at least 2018 all citizens will be able to totally lose themselves in the endless beauty of our planet's natural wonders."

Pic: Wikimedia Commons