People visit a memorial for victims of the May 24, 2022 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen children and two adults were killed at Robb Elementary School. Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.

The other day someone told me this generation of kids—I don’t know its name; “Generation Can I Borrow Your Charger?” or something—is too soft.

Rendering: Adam Pardee/STAFF.

I didn’t think about it until later. I was too busy enjoying my last bit of real sunshine and oxygen before the sirens wail, the land starts burning and we cover the U.S. in a floating biodome to preserve life from the radiation, dust storms, fire tornadoes, mutated superbugs, armed masses who won’t shoot if they just have better mental health care, etc.

I think the most dangerous risk we face are elected officials conceding “we” need to do something about “mental health” (but won’t pay for it and actually cut it from budgets while having no clue what it means to begin with) in a nation where buying an assault weapon is as difficult as purchasing a Slurpee.

By the way, how long do you think it would take for Slurpees to be banned if we started throwing them at politicians every time they lie in public?

So, that aside … are today’s kids soft as Slurpees?

The only comparison I have is mine: Generation X. We sat too close to the television and probably irradiated our brains. That’s about all I got. We grew up and decided to buy poodles and push them around town in strollers. So maybe we really do have brain damage.

I know we didn’t have school shootings on the news every week—which is why Thurston and Columbine was such big news to us in 1998 and 1999. It also may help explain our failings as helicopter parents, in not allowing our kids to grow independently strong because we’re terrified squirrels will learn how to use AR-15s.

I know as a child, we didn’t have the Internet and social media as a conduit for our peers to constantly batter our self-esteem into oatmeal every day from the comfort of their own bedrooms.

I know we didn’t have active shooter drills, and no one suggested we needed police in our schools or that we should entrust guns to the same teachers we now don’t think capable of teaching history. Only two or three decades ago, that wasn’t reality.

Obviously that’s changed. And people criticize kids for being more sensitive in 2022.

I try to at least pretend to pay attention to my kids sometimes. I don’t automatically understand everything, but I do occasionally try. These kids are in pain. Real pain. Not simple growing-pain pain.

Every generation has bullies, but never has it been easier to be a bully. And not just because being a bully, in some places, has become a political plus.

I’m talking about electrified amplification and multiplication of this generation’s pain.

I see and hear a generation being peer-judged via electronics from all directions every waking moment of the day, making them question every word, gesture, feeling and non-feeling someone is telling them they should or shouldn’t have. And everyone is expected to weigh in.

When I was a kid, I came home from school every day and was done with those kids for the next 17 hours. I did some homework, ate, watched “Ultraman,” ate again, watched “Sanford and Son” and went to bed. Add to that a couple telephone conversations a night in high school that might stir up the social pot before the next morning.

But we had absolutely nothing to compare to the constant bombardment today’s kids have dropping on them. I wasn’t faced with drama, judgment, peer pressure and seemingly life and death decisions the entire time I wasn’t asleep.

There was time to cool off after confrontation or apparent minor betrayal. There was time to reassess judgment. There wasn’t a way to react to one’s entire social group and light the fuse on even more reaction until critical mass was reached in the evening, when everyone is supposed to be safe at home.

I also see a generation exposed to a lightning-fast news cycle that includes more media messages and paid advertising in a week than I had in a year as a kid. We used to have space to breathe between crises, real and imagined.

I see a generation that is learning to value diversity but, at the same time, being forced by those who don’t understand to make decisions about who they are WAY too soon. Middle schoolers shouldn’t be pressured by anyone—especially other middle schoolers—to decide something like gender preference or identity when they haven’t even fished the gurgling hell of puberty yet. Especially when the old pressures around sex haven’t abated. There’s still too much of the old “boys will be boys” garbage going on.

So is this generation softer? Maybe … and maybe with good reason. I used to have bad dreams about vampires or Bigfoot getting me, which was OK because I eventually knew they weren’t real. Kids now have nightmares of other kids coming back to school with guns. No one is growing out of those anytime soon.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.