I feel bad for kids today. Life is so much more complicated now than when I was a kid.
For example, when I was growing up, there wasn’t the proliferation of beverages that we have today. You basically had soda or nothing.
I mean, there was milk. But no kid’s going to drink milk if they’ve got real carbonated alternatives.
The exception to that rule is chocolate milk. Chocolate milk is middle ground. It’s doable if there are no better alternatives. In a pinch, we’ll allow it.
I guess Kool-Aid falls into the same camp. It’s good. But if you drink it, you’re the kid with a red-stained Kool-Aid ring over your top lip for the rest of the day.
In short, it tastes great, but you look like a buffoon.
Keep in mind, too, that when soda’s on the table, chocolate milk and Kool-Aid are the “also rans” of that election.
For example, generations of people still talk about what they called soda where they grew up.
Did you call it soda, no, we called it pop. Some places uncreatively mash those two terms up into soda-pop.
Where I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains, we had very little concept of branding. And so, we called it a Coke.
You want a Coke? Yeah. What kind? Dr. Pepper.
Now, though…kids have to choose from Starbucks, Selzter, Bubbly, Lacroix, Monsters, Red Bulls, blah blah blah.
It’s the arms race of beverages. There’s way too much moisture diversity, I say, and kids are the ones who lose.
Kids get overwhelmed. They make bad decisions.
Can I just have water?
Water? What the hell’s wrong with you?
Water?
Rookie.