Kids ignore his demands to get off his lawn. He ends each scolding with, "And I'll be watching out for you," but they don't obey him like he obeyed his neighbor when he was growing up. He turned tail and ran the dozens of times the old man yelled at him to stay off his lawn. He and his friends were almost always already scampering before they heard the old man yell, "That's right! Get out of here!"
He paid the price and has now rightfully graduated to being the old man with the lawn. He wishes kids today had the same respect that he and his friends had when they might say "yes sir" before they dashed off. He doesn't want them dashing off to make a plan to egg the old man's house that night like they did, but he also doesn't want them throwing eggs at him while he is yelling at them. It's disrespectful. They don't have the passiveness that people his age have mixed in with their aggression, and it shows.
Kids these days fact-check everything without any regard that he already knows the answer because of how old he is. He remembers fondly the beatings he got from old people when he was a kid and questioned authority. He wonders if bringing violence back into the lives of young people might be the answer to them accepting what old people say as the truth. Sure, kids today have access to modern technology, but how does that compare to the memories that old people beat into him, like communism is the work of the devil himself.
He learned to accept quickly what old people said as the truth in order to avoid the pain of questioning an answer. These days, he longs for those old days to return. After all, it's his turn to hand out the abuse. Besides, he rationalizes, it happened to him, and he turned out okay.
The old man sits alone on his porch watching as his lawn gets infested by people with different thoughts. People who think differently than him are the reason everything has changed. Instead of there being a kid or two for every old person to yell at, he now watches alone while many kids take seats on his lawn. No longer do kids say "yes sir" to the old people who sat on the porch after cleaning off the eggs some disrespectful punks broke on the house the previous night. They do things like ignore him or yell back at him.
He wonders why kids think it is all about what is best for them when it is clearly what is best for him that is important from his view on the porch. He reasons that kids today just do not appreciate the hard work he put in to pay off the mortgage on the house that he paid $40,000 for and wouldn't sell to them for a penny less than $500,000 today. He could calculate how much those kids would have to make, but he is too busy yelling at them for wanting to be paid living wages.
They have no respect for the load of facts that he now knows because he is old and a veteran. He would point to the three fingers he is missing on one hand to prove that he learned his lessons from his military experience, but he lost the index finger on his other hand learning another lesson about lawnmowers after that.
"Why, I ought to punch you all in your noses," he screams in an attempt to threaten the violence like that from which he learned.
"Yeah, sure boomer," they yell back.
"You wouldn't say that back when I was in the big war," he says as he shakes what would be a fist if he still had all of his fingers. He bangs his cane emphatically while mumbling to himself about how people don't respect one another these days. Just then, an egg splats on the porch next to him.
He bellows, "I am old, but that doesn't mean I don't have some fight left in me from my days in combat! Now, quit using my arguments against me and get off my lawn!"
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