ST. LOUIS — Frustrated siblings, Andrea and Nino Shore, finally decided that it was time to sit their aging parents down and give the exact same talk that their parents had given them twenty years ago, sources close to the family confirmed.
“We should have set better parental controls so our aging parents didn’t have unlimited access to such toxic rhetoric,” said Andrea, scrolling through the search history on her mother’s iPad. “This woman sat the two of us down in the kitchen when we were like nine, and said ‘you can’t trust anything you read on the internet.’ She wouldn’t even let us use Wikipedia for school projects because ‘anyone can say anything,’ but here she is spending an afternoon on CowboyGazette.com reading about how Matt Cartwright is actually a distant relative of Leon Trotsky. I guarantee she doesn’t know who either of those people are.”
Her sibling’s outlook on the situation was equally as grim.
“We have to say something to them,” said Nino, while trying to save the hard drive on her parents’ Compaq computer which had been corrupted by malware. “I think the internet really did break a lot of people’s brains a little bit. If you didn’t grow up with it like we did, gradually getting used to it, it’s probably really dangerous to just jump in the deep end. Doctors used to prescribe heroin to cure headaches and shit like that, it’s no different than mom spending nine hours a day on Facebook. We need to sit them down and have a reasonable conversation about the responsible use of technology before they end up burning down a library because book sharing is ‘socialist’ or something.”
Experts confirmed that this is an increasingly common phenomenon.
“It’s definitely been on the upswing in recent years,” said psychologist Maria Ocampo. “You’ve got an aging population that’s been outpaced by technology. It’s a scary new world and they’re looking for someone to blame for it, never mind that it’s people their age who fucked everything up in the first place. I think this is the new normal. Sometimes you just have to gently remind your aging loved ones what reality is like. For example: nobody is putting mind-control chemicals in the water supply, they’re sending them through your television.”
At press time Andrea and Nino were making emergency phone calls to their respective therapists after stumbling upon their father’s X-rated search history.