Our Generation

I am a teacher and I was speaking to my kids today during school. I asked them "What do you do after school?" Their responses were: "Go on facebook." "Nothing." "Play games on X-Box." I realized that children lost the ability to play and do not know the true joys of a summer day. This poem is the result. 

From hop scotch
To cops and robbers,
I played outside
To pass the hours.

Our own phone lines
To Yikes and Paul Frank
We saved our pennies
In our piggy bank.

Are You Afraid of the Dark?
And SNICK at night
To stay up to watch them
With your parents you'd fight.

You called your friends
Made plans after school
If we imagined a disconnect
We'd be called a fool.

What happened then,
To that simpler time?
A change occurred
Without reason or rhyme.

No longer do children
Play outside all day
To run, imagine laugh,
Instead they'd rather stay

Inside the house,
On a computer all bright,
Surfing the web,
On Facebook all night.

Friends are made
Not in flesh and blood,
With a click of the mouse,
You've got a new bud.

We've disconnected
So far from our life,
Each other's laughter,
One another's strife.

We have forgotten
A simple touch,
From human interaction,
We learn so much.

Kids today, they
Don't understand
The world out there,
The need for a plan.

Behind their PC
They cannot stay
Chatting and gaming
And wasting a day.

What happened to us
Our own feeling goal?
Wires and gadgets
Have replaced our very soul.

Humanity is gone
Or seems far away,
On cellphones and laptops
We spend our days.

I long for summer
Of playing in the sun
An imaginative game
From when I was young.

We knew how to laugh
We knew how to play
We knew how to touch
And we knew what to say.

We knew our friends
And where they lived
We knew their touch
And the love they gived.

Today we miss that,
The human touch.
To get that back,
Am I asking too much?