How bad is it out there? Well, it’s pretty ugly. We have a pornography culture that some of these kids have never otherwise known, and now they have been taught in their public schools that all kinds of alternative sex practices are perfectly healthy and encouraged. They are taught that self-expression sexually is a good thing, so of course, we now see a society reflect those traits. And it was never more evident to me than in a recent trip to Kings Island, the big amusement park near my home in Northern Cincinnati. I was there with my family to see the re-opening of the Adventure Express, a ride that has been around for a while, but they have updated the theming in that part of the park and given everything a fresh paint job. I’ve always loved the ride, and as I often do at the end of a hard week of work in the summer, I like to meet my family there to ride a few roller coasters and have some dinner around the Eiffel Tower. I have been to Paris with my family and honestly prefer the Eiffel Tower at Kings Island to the one in Paris any day. So that is where I like to blow off the stress of a hard week at Kings Island. So I’m there at the park with my two daughters, their kids, my wife, and one of my sons-in-law, and we wanted to check out all the cool new things at the Adventure Express. It was a very nice day, the park had low attendance, so most of the rides were walk-ons. What could go wrong? 

Well, all my grandkids wanted to take turns riding with me. They had already been there all day, and when they think of adventure, they think of me, so they all wanted time to ride together with me, but each wanted a turn to ride with me on this epic ride that reminded them so much of Indiana Jones. That is after all the ride’s history back when Paramount Studios owned the park. That Adventure Express was designed to be an Indiana Jones ride reflective of the mine car chase from the movie Temple of Doom. And in the ride queue, they used to play music from the Indiana Jones movie The Last Crusade. So the kids wanted to ride it multiple times, and we ended up riding it 12 times. But it started off very uncomfortably.

I had been wearing an expensive business suit that day, and when I got to the park, I took off the jacket and my tie. I unbuttoned my shirt because it was hot out; I figured people were walking around half-undressed from the water park anyway, so why not. As we were going through the line at Adventure Express to get to the usher who tells people which car to get into, a very small young man was having a hard time speaking to us. I told the kid that we had six at our party, my three grandchildren, myself, one of my daughters, and my wife. He was openly gushing in a sexual way and staring at my chest with my shirt unbuttoned, and fanning himself flamboyantly. He said, “Oh my gosh, oh my, that is just too much, oh my, your shirt. It’s so breathtaking,. I repeated that we had six people. I was trying to contain the incident because it was strange for the little ones. They just wanted to ride this ride with their grandpa; they weren’t prepared for some kid trying to pick him up in a sexual way. He couldn’t have been much older than 16, so there were all kinds of things wrong with this exchange. 

After several uncomfortable moments, the train was looking for passengers, so he pointed us where to go while still fanning himself, holding that stick they use to measure kids’ height before riding. My daughter noticed all this and laughed about it as we sat because it was entirely too obvious.   But this wasn’t the only time this had happened recently. On a family trip to the Mellow Mushroom in West Chester, which is a fancy pizza place, they have really good Hawaiian Pizza; our waiter was a drag queen and was significantly over the top gay, and made his intentions toward me very obvious.   He kept talking about how he loved my hat and how strong and sexy I looked, and my family was sitting right there. It was bizarre and uncomfortable. I downplayed it, we had our pizza, and we left as soon as possible. The waiter acted like he wanted to be sexually pleasured right there at our table; he had no reservations about openly expressing himself. I felt bad for the management, as I did for the Kings Island crew too. If they tried to correct the behavior, they would be called discriminatory toward alternative sexual deviants. So they were being forced to pick their poison, which was just another reminder of how bad this modern social system was. 

I hate to say I’m used to that kind of thing, but I handled it all so my kids and grandkids would not be damaged for life. I will do something regardless of who is in the way if I want to do something. And if I want to have fun with my family, I will, even if some perverted people try to wreck the experience. But it’s becoming much more common. I remember when you had to be 18 to experience any kind of sexual material, and now, it’s out in the open with an almost gleeful disregard for family values. Desecration is on their minds, and they have been trained to be activists for that cause. The kid at Kings Island, at any other time, would have either been fired for sexually harassing the guests, or he would have contained his attraction to older males, obvious father figure issues that many young people have these days due to the failures in the social network, not enough good dads in the homes and kids lost as to how to behave as pending adults properly. I felt a little sorry for the kid, to be honest. And since we rode the ride another 11 times, I had to see him a lot. And I tried to keep things light and lofty and overlook the obvious sexual tension. But he was visibly shaken by the presence of masculinity for many reasons. And it would have otherwise ruined our visit to the park. Yet we see this kind of thing everywhere these days, and much more often because our culture has encouraged it much to the desecration of civility. It would have been wrong even if the kid was a girl. Nobody in that age group should be hitting on men over 50. They really shouldn’t be thinking about sex of any kind. They should be learning something, doing something, and working hard to earn money to build a good life. But the failure of our times is our public education system, media culture, and politics that have encouraged kids like that to behave that way. And the cost of it all is yet to come. 

Rich Hoffman