SATURDAY MORNING WITH CRANKY DON JOE | A Hundred Teenagers Organized in Twenty Minutes. I'm Still Looking for My Glasses.

My name is Cranky Don Joe. Cranky DJ to a lot of my neighbors.

I am not an expert. Which immediately makes me more qualified than half the people on television.

Now, I understand Brooklyn Center has been dealing with these things they call "park takeovers." Apparently dozens, sometimes more than a hundred young people, suddenly gather at a park. Social media lights up. Police show up. Businesses lock their doors. Everybody starts asking questions.

The first question I have is this: How are these kids so organized?

Seriously. A hundred teenagers can coordinate a gathering across multiple cities in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, my church committee has been trying to schedule a pancake breakfast since Easter. At this point we're aiming for Christmas. Two committee members still haven't responded to the email. I know they received it. I watched them open it. One of them replied to a completely different email during the meeting.

How are teenagers running operations that would impress military generals while grown adults can't decide whether syrup should be served in individual cups? It is impressive. Concerning, but impressive.

For years, my generation has been conducting what I can only describe as a national campaign against young people being indoors. We complained about video games. We complained about phones. We complained about social media.

"Go outside," we said. "Get some fresh air. Meet real people."

Well. Apparently they listened. And now everybody is upset. Somewhere there is a teenager saying, "Make up your minds."

To be fair, I don't think this is exactly what anybody had in mind. When your grandmother says, "Go outside," she's imagining a bicycle ride. Maybe a basketball game. Perhaps a nice walk around the neighborhood. She is not imagining three police departments, multiple city officials, social media investigators, and a city council agenda item.

That escalated faster than my blood pressure during tax season.

When I was growing up, if a hundred kids showed up somewhere unexpectedly, it meant somebody's mother cooked too much food. That's it. No apps. No livestreams. No location drops. No viral posts. Just one mother standing in a kitchen saying, "I made enough for everybody." And somehow everybody heard about it. To this day, I don't know how.

My grandson tried explaining modern social media to me last week. Ten minutes into the explanation, I was confused. Twenty minutes into it, I was concerned. Thirty minutes into it, I started wondering whether I was legally required to know this information. Forty minutes in, I wasn't entirely convinced my toaster wasn't spying on me.

Everything is connected now. My refrigerator can apparently talk to my phone. Why? The refrigerator has one job. Stay cold. That's it. I don't need updates from my vegetables. If a carrot has something important to tell me, we've already got bigger problems.

But at least the refrigerator stays in the kitchen. Out in the parks, city officials say these youth gatherings can involve fights, property damage, replica firearms, fireworks, and enough confusion to shut down an entire neighborhood space.

Which brings me to another question: Why are fireworks involved in everything now?

When I was young, fireworks had standards. Fireworks had boundaries. Fireworks appeared on July Fourth. Maybe New Year's Eve if they were feeling ambitious. Now, fireworks show up everywhere. Birthdays. Graduations. Sporting events. Random Wednesdays. A sale at the furniture store. A cousin gets a promotion. Somebody successfully resets a password.

BOOM. Fireworks.

At this rate, somebody is going to launch bottle rockets because the self-checkout machine accepted a coupon on the first try.

And don't get me started on self-checkout. Whoever invented that machine owes me compensation. I didn't come to the store looking for part-time employment; I came to buy toothpaste. Instead, I'm scanning items, weighing bananas, entering codes, and solving puzzles. Last week the machine told me there was an unexpected item in the bagging area. The unexpected item was the item it just told me to put there. I spent five minutes arguing with a robot, and I lost.

Between dealing with rogue grocery store robots and monitoring city parks, modern life is exhausting.

Take the city officials currently monitoring teenage social media. God bless them. I can barely monitor my cholesterol. I tried monitoring my grandson's social media once. After fifteen minutes I wasn't sure whether I was looking at a conversation, a treasure map, or instructions for assembling furniture.

Everything was emojis. Fire. Rocket. Monkey. Pizza. Crown. At no point did anybody use words, and yet somehow everybody knew exactly what was happening except me.

Imagine being the city employee who has to explain that at a city council meeting. "Well, ladies and gentlemen, our analysis indicates the event originated from a fire emoji, followed by a gorilla emoji, followed by what experts believe was a slice of pizza."

Good luck putting that into government records.

The truth is, every generation worries about the next one. My grandparents worried about my parents. My parents worried about me. Now my generation worries about everybody. The weather. The economy. The traffic. The youth. The adults. The fact that nobody answers their phone anymore.

I called somebody the other day. They texted me back. I called them because I wanted to talk. They texted: "What's up?"

What's up? The phone is up. Answer it.

But here's what I know. Most young people are good kids. Most parents are trying. Most communities want safe parks. And most residents just want to enjoy a summer evening without wondering whether a hundred teenagers are about to appear out of thin air like a highly organized marching band with Wi-Fi.

That doesn't seem like too much to ask.

Then again, I am not an expert. Which, as I mentioned earlier, may be exactly why I'm qualified to discuss it.

Until next time,

Cranky DJ

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