Parenting & Family Quote by Jeffrey Bernard

Bernard’s line lands like a hangover confession: not pious, not performative, just stunned by the emotional weather he’s encountering in the next generation. The phrasing matters. “I don’t remember” isn’t “we were better,” it’s “my memory can’t even locate that posture.” He frames hatred as an adopted stance, something you get “full of,” like a diet of grievance, not an innate trait. That “full” does quiet work: it implies saturation, indulgence, even a kind of glutted comfort in contempt.

As a journalist and professional barfly with a reputation for unsparing self-reportage, Bernard isn’t selling optimism. He’s registering a cultural shift with the sideways authority of someone who’s seen plenty of ugliness - and still finds this particular variety unsettling. The target isn’t “kids” in the abstract; it’s the ambience around them, the social permission structures that make dislike feel like personality. By using “some kids I’ve come across now,” he avoids generational sermonizing. It’s anecdotal, observational, almost reluctant.

The subtext is a question posed as a memory lapse: what happened that makes hatred so available, so early, so casual? Bernard’s genius is refusing to diagnose it directly. He leaves space for readers to supply their own culprits - politics, media, fractured communities, status anxiety - while his tone implies the more damning possibility: that adults built a world where contempt is the easiest language to learn.