St. Pete man ready to start being afraid of children

Grant Ligwitz of St. Petersburg has come to the realization that he might be at the point in his life where he should start being afraid of children.

“I’m not old by any means, but I’m also not getting any younger,” he said. “I’m 38!”

He said the idea occurred to him on a recent shopping excursion at Publix.

“I was picking up a few things and there were these kids running around like maniacs. One of them bumped into me and almost knocked me down,” he said. “It occurred to me, ‘where the hell are the parents?’, which is not the kind of thing that normally crosses my mind. But the first thing that I thought was I could have gone down, hard, and maybe gotten hurt.”

“I realized, ‘this is how it begins’,” he said.

Since then he’s noticed children’s behavior from a different perspective.

“The other day, some teenagers were harassing my next door neighbor. They cut through her yard and she yelled at them so they said, ‘shut up you fat old bitch.’ Normally, I would have laughed and thought, ‘yeah, you fat old bitch’ because she is a fat old bitch. But this time, I thought, what if that was me? What if they tried to escalate things and attack me physically? Would I be able to defend myself? And I wasn’t sure I would!”

“So I called 911 for her, which is something I would never have done, even a couple of years ago,” he said. “But there was a whole bunch of them, you know?”

He said, “This is going to be a generation with whom I have nothing in common. They’re going to listen to different music, have different heroes and different opinions on social issues. People my age will start dying off and we’ll be outnumbered. And there will be even more of them coming after that!”

At that point, he announced, “You know what? I’m not afraid, I’m terrified.” He then went inside, slammed the door, closed his blinds and started blasting OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and other popular albums from 2003 at high volume’.