Each year, our world is blessed by the rising generation reaching the age of majority and going into the world at large for education, trade and training or military service. Some marry and some just drift.
Within each one is a clock that started the day they drew their first breath and will tick until the Good Lord calls them home.
So, let's do some homework.
According to Beloit College, here is a bit of a head start on how those in the latest crop of college age kids have fared thus far in their life.
Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989.
For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead.
1. What Berlin wall?
2. Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
3. Rush Limbaugh and the "Dittoheads" have always been lambasting liberals.
4. They never "rolled down" a car window.
5. Michael Moore has always been angry and funny.
6. They may confuse the Keating Five with a rock group.
7. They have grown up with bottled water.
8. General Motors has always been working on an electric car.
9. Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
10. Pete Rose has never played baseball.
11. Rap music has always been mainstream.
12. Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!
13. "Off the hook" has never had anything to do with a telephone.
14. Music has always been "unplugged."
15. Russia has always had a multi-party political system.
16. Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.
17. They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.
18. The NBA season has always gone on and on and on and on.
19. Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks, and Bart Simpson.
20. Half of them may have been members of the Baby-sitters Club.
21. Eastern Airlines has never "earned their wings" in their lifetime.
22. No one has ever been able to sit down comfortably to a meal of "liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."
23. Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM.
24. Being "lame" has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.
25. Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN.
26. Katie Couric has always had screen cred.
27. Al Gore has always been running for president or thinking about it.
28. They never found a prize in a Coca-Cola "MagiCan."
29. They were too young to understand Judas Priest's subliminal messages.
30. When all else fails, the Prozac defense has always been a possibility.
31. Multigrain chips have always provided healthful junk food.
32. They grew up in Wayne's World.
33. U2 has always been more than a spy plane.
34. They were introduced to Jack Nicholson as "The Joker."
35. Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
36. American rock groups have always appeared in Moscow.
37. Commercial product placements have been the norm in films and on TV.
38. On Parents' Day on campus, their folks could be mixing it up with Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz with daughter Zöe, or Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford with son Cody.
39. Fox has always been a major network.
40. They drove their parents crazy with the Beavis and Butt-head laugh.
41. The "Blue Man Group" has always been everywhere.
42. Women's studies majors have always been offered on campus.
43. Being a latchkey kid has never been a big deal.
44. Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time.
45. They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee.
46. Most phone calls have never been private.
47. High definition television has always been available.
48. Microbreweries have always been ubiquitous.
49. Virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.
50. Smoking has never been allowed in public spaces in France.
51. China has always been more interested in making money than in reeducation.
52. Time has always worked with Warner.
53. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.
54. The purchase of ivory has always been banned.
55. MTV has never featured music videos.
56. The space program has never really caught their attention except in disasters.
57. Jerry Springer has always been lowering the level of discourse on TV.
58. They get much more information from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from the newspaper.
59. They're always texting 1 n other.
60. They will encounter roughly equal numbers of female and male professors in the classroom.
61. They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.
62. They have no idea who Rusty Jones was or why he said "goodbye to rusty cars."
63. Avatars have nothing to do with Hindu deities.
64. Chavez has nothing to do with iceberg lettuce and everything to do with oil.
65. Illinois has been trying to ban smoking since the year they were born.
66. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.
67. Chronic fatigue syndrome has always been debilitating and controversial.
68. Burma has always been Myanmar.
69 Dilbert has always been ridiculing cubicle culture.
70. Food packaging has always included nutritional labeling.
It certainly begs the question: how would they survive in the world that their parents knew?
Let's take a trip back to the 50's and 60's and review a bit.
1. If you got thirsty and wanted a drink of water, you either went into the kitchen (without banging the screen door, thank you!) and drank from the tap in the kitchen or from the trusty garden hose at the spigot beneath the weeping willow during the summer.
2. We cried when the news broadcasts showed the Berlin Wall fall. And we celebrated! (and for the record, my son will be serving a mission in the area that was formerly behind the wall!)
3. Text messages involved either a 'manual' or a temperamental electric typewriter that had an eraser or a bottle of White-Out nearby. Multiple copies were generated with 'carbon paper'.
4. Humvee? You mean Jeep, right?
5. Rolling down the car windows and driving fast WAS the air conditioner.
6. "Charlie Hustle" made the Cincinnati Reds games worth watching! Pete Rose diving head first into home plate for a score was a guaranteed good time.
7. Few people had ever heard of Prozac.
8. Venezuela was not much more than a wide spot on the road when it came to world attention or power brokering.
9. Nutritional labeling meant your mother sniffed the week old pot roast leavings and labeled it good to eat or good to go in the garbage.
10. Private telephone calls were considered normal. Only rude people "talked about their dirty laundry" in front of strangers.
While I can't possibly come up with an answer to them all on the spot, you get the idea.
Some of the things that have come along in the intervening years since my childhood and adolescence have definately been vast improvements over the old ways from the past.
But I can't help but wonder about some of the 'improvements' we are offering to our kids are really doing them any favors over time. Momma used to say 'every child needs to eat a tablespoon full of dirt before they get grown'. And yes, we did make mud pies and occasionally double-dog dare each other to 'take a little bite!'
We were holding a car wash for the kids at church one day to help them raise money for summer camp expenses and one boy pulled up the garden hose and was going in for a cool, refreshing drink when his mother cried out in total panic. "DON'T DRINK FROM THAT FILTHY, NASTY HOSE!! YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S BEEN AND WHAT TOXIC MATERIALS ARE IN IT!!"
The kid dropped the hose like it had been a writhing cobra ready to strike and darted over to get a bottle of sparkling water fresh from the tap in back of the warehouse in Paramus, New Jersey. But the LABEL said "Spring water from artesian wells deep in the foothills of Gaa gaa land." That must make it infinitely better. Certainly more expensive. (And it does pay the bills for Vinnie and his lovely wife Marie...the one with the nice mustache.)
WHATEVER!
Although I have been known to drink bottled water on occasion, I have never been known to turn down a fresh drink from a garden hose. I have had to wash the dirt off of the end from time to time, but again, when you are thirsty, a bit of dirt won't kill you. (reference Momma's comment above) At least it wouldn't in the childhood I experienced.
Now we are told that our water is more toxin than H20 and contains enough filth to create a rainbow of algea colors. I am not too sure all of their careful filtering and osmotic changes can remove it all. But if it's in a bottle, we buy it at a buck thirty five a pop and suck it down like it is better than...,well,...water.
Al Gore and his rabid followers talk big about the problems of pollution in the world and buy up some ridiculous stuff called "Carbon Offsets". What they really are is the modern day equivalent of conscripts, who were poor men hired and paid to fight in place of some pitiful cowardly rich boy who wouldn't own up to his personal responsibilty and found some Bubba to go to war for him.
How can you pay a fee to pollute and leave a ginormous mess behind and say you are "pollution free" and leaving "no carbon footprint"??? It's like sending Bubba off to war to be killed in your stead. Sure, you are still alive, but what about Bubba - he is dead! Whatever money he got paid was most certainly given to his hard pressed family and is no more.
Saying that you personally aren't leaving a carbon footprint didn't toss one lily on poor Bubba's grave. Somebody still has to pay the piper for the dance. And the whackos think it shouldn't ever be them that picks up the check.
Okay people, the fact is that money can't fix everything and times do change. But if we forget the things that brought us to this point and time, our personal perspective can't help but be skewed by an abundant lack of material conclusions.
Somewhere out there is the truth. Or at least an unreasonable facsimile of the same.
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