Dear Ann Landers,
have been reading a lot lately about the stress our children are under these days. I say, baloney. You are about my age, Ann, and I'll bet you will agree that we had it a lot rougher than the kids have it today. The Depression was so awful I don't know how we lived through it. There wasn't enough food in the house to feed us five kids. If the neighbors hadn't helped, I think we would have starved. There were no jobs. Both Mom and Dad took any little piece of work they could find. I remember when Dad put in three days at a coal yard and was paid in coal, which he was darned happy to get. Kids today don't know what it is to be hungry. A lot of them get fed breakfast and lunch in school at government expense, which means by us taxpayers, of course. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president he started the Civil-ian Conservation Corps, which was a godsend. What a brilliant idea! It not only helped rebuild our country but provided millions of young people with jobs. I was one of them. How many kids today would be willing to work that hard? Darned few, I'll bet. I look at my grandchildren, Ann, and they are cream puffs compared to what we were. They have it so much softer, it isn't even funny. I'll bet you agree with me. Please print my letter, and let me know what you think. -A Feisty Michigander

Dear Feisty,
Here's your letter, but I can't say I agree with you that kids today have it a lot easier than we did. The problems they face are worse than poverty. In fact, I believe growing up in the Depression gave us motivation and survival skills that today's young people don't have. To put it another way, they have the disadvantage of too many advantages. Today's children must deal with the reality of nuclear weapons that could incinerate them overnight. And they are going to have to figure out how to revitalize the environment. In some parts of the country, you must go to a museum to see what a butterfly looks like. The air is polluted, the rivers and lakes are dying and the ozone layer has holes in it. When I was growing up, we never used to lock the doors at night. Today, everything is locked up, and in spite of the locks, alarms and se-curity systems, the number of muggings, rapes and murders that occur in even the best neighborhoods is appalling. Crime is rampant. As a teenager, I never heard of cocaine or crack. A few of the musi-cians smoked "reefers," but teenagers didn't touch them. Today, there's speed and angel dust and crack and gang violence and murders that are clearly drug-related. There are billions of dollars to be made dealing dope, and some teenagers want part of the action. AIDS is something else we never heard of. And it's a death sen-tence. The sexually transmitted diseases in our day could be cured with penicillin. I haven't even mentioned the mania for body-building that has cre-ated steroid junkies. This is a dangerous drug, and young people are going bananas over it. Also, the craze to be pencil-thin has produced an astonishing number of anorexic and bulimic teenagers. I'm glad I have lived the greater part of my life. I wouldn't be 20 again for all the tea in Sri Lanka. I just pray that my grandchildren and yours will be able to pick their way through the mine fields of the '90s and into the 21st century. "Feisty Michigander" was convinced that the older generation (mine) had it a lot rougher than the kids today. I disagreed, citing the threat of nuclear war.; pollution, crime, drugs, gangs, AIDS and so on. That exchange really turned the readers on. Here's a sam-pling of some high-octane mail: