The pussification of America’s teenage boys, electric bikes

December 19, 2025

Dell Franklin,

By DELL FRANKLIN

Editor’s Note: The following series, “Life in Radically Gentrifying Cayucos by the Sea,” to be posted biweekly includes the notes, thoughts, and opinions of an original American voice: author Dell Franklin. 

Franklin’s memoir, “The ballplayer’s Son” and “Life on The Mississippi, 1969” are currently on Amazon.

While down south I read in the LA Times about five teenage boys between 13 and 15 on e-bikes beating up and hospitalizing a man in his sixties in Hermosa Beach. I wondered what this older man did to provoke these kids to attack him.

I can imagine they were wheeling about on the strand or maybe a sidewalk or a street and either intimidated or came close to hitting the man and he reacted angrily like most older adults would at teenage obnoxious behavior, and the e-bikers, instead of just calling him an asshole or flipping him the finger, decided to punch, kick and stomp him and then take off on their e-bikes, hopefully going undetected in their vicious and cowardly assault–an entitlement to administer meanness and cruelty so as to confirm a sense of pseudo-masculinity pervading America.

But they were detected and arrested and now face going to juvenile court and possibly ending up in one of those institutions where hardened teenage thugs from the ghettos of Los Angeles will definitely terrorize them.

But of course, since they live in an area so beyond affluence that celebrity entertainers and pro athletes and business big shots share their environment, they will probably go to court with the best lawyers money can buy and perhaps have their hands slapped and told not to be naughty anymore, and dads will handle with ease the financial suit from the beaten man.

In Cayucos, there are small packs of 12 and 13 year boys doing wheelies on regular bikes on the main drag and along the seawall, perhaps annoying adults and old goats, but to me they are just kids feeling their oats and the necessary freedom of rebellion before eventually giving in to maturity. But there are also teenagers wheeling around on e-bikes that piss off even the most mild and tolerant grownups in Cayucos, who’ve had enough.

One hears the complaints.

Nobody was more guilty of bicycle shenanigans and other mischief than the kids I ran around with in our neighborhood in Compton back in the 1950s. And at that time a bike was a big deal, it gave you a special freedom and mobility, and everybody wanted a Schwinn bike for Christmas.

I got an off brand. My dad was trying to get over the hump in his business around 1955 and got a deal, and he told me this bike was “good enough and it’ll make you strong.

“Where I grew up in Chicago,” he explained, “I had this beat up secondhand bike and I rode that thing all over town. I was always looking for the best games, baseball, football, soccer…Sometimes I rode that thing ten miles down to the Irish neighborhoods, and after playing all day the ride home was tough, but it made me resilient, built up muscle and taught me to overcome pain and exhaustion, gave me pride and confidence, and I learned to love that old bike.”

I guess it helped my dad, because he went on to get a football scholarship to the University of Illinois and later played professional baseball for the Detroit Tigers, and throughout his life he had amazing stamina and resistance to pain, seldom missing a day’s work.

I don’t know what’s going on today in our society when a young teenager needs an e-bike, which is guaranteed to turn him into a weak-limb pussy.

Though I guess it does enhance that feeling of freedom and rebellion and a license to go faster and hog a street and refuse to pull over for drivers and infuriate and sometimes terrify some cranky adult walking their dog or just ambling along with all kinds of aches and pains and physical frailties. And, in some cases, that feeling of entitlement and power and reckless abandon leads to the kind of hostility that resulted in the beating of an elderly man down south.

But I guess if so-and-so has an e-bike, peer pressure abounds, and since they cost more than a regular bike it makes sense that those with parents who can afford it easily get these e-bikes. Yet the whole idea of young boys needing e-bikes to get around and go up hills has turned our young male race into a bunch of butter-soft pansies heading for one of America’s greatest nightmares—health threatening obesity in the richest and most powerful country in the world.

Sad to say, most of them will not be able to pass any kind of physical test to get into any branch of the military, but they probably won’t entertain any notions of such sacrifice anyway. Always seeking the path of least resistance as a child, and having parents allowing it, and even condoning it, is producing an entire generation of American men without the will to overcome obstacles that past generations have.

Ban these damn e-bikes for anybody under 18. As for adults? Unless you’re severely compromised, try a real bike.