Tomorrow is my 40th birthday and I must be getting old, because I find myself thinking about the youth of today and how the world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket.
Kids today seem to be so into themselves and their stuff. Granted, we are all very materialistic in this country, but kids today have everything at their fingertips - Ipods, cell phones, computers, video games, High Definition Television with remote. You name it and they have it.
When I was a kid we had four VHF and three UHF channels - only two of the UHF channels came in without major static and one of those was in Spanish. The one that did come in decent became the Fox network. Kids today probably don't even know what VHF and UHF are, let alone what they stand for.
We had a remote for our TV - it was the youngest child in the family that could walk, and if you wanted to watch a different channel, you told them to go up to the TV and change the channel. You'd watch that channel for a second while they stood there and if you didn't like what was on, they changed it to the next one and the cycle continued until the commercial was over and you inevitably ended up back on the original channel. If the commercial wasn't over yet, you'd have them cycle through one more time just in case something good came on during the trip around the dial. Probably the only thing that broke that up was when you tried a UHF channel and you had to fool with the antennae to get it to come in. And if the President came on, you were hosed because he was on every available channel. There was no Nickelodeon or Comedy Central. If the President was on you had better habla Espanol. That is why kids today are obese - they have a remote control. They don't have to get up and change the channel anymore.
If we wanted to call someone, we had better limber up our index finger because we only had a rotary phone. If you had a phone number with a bunch of nines or zeros in it, you were a loner with no friends because no one wanted to take the time to call you. They could ride their bike to your house faster than they could call you from 2 miles away. Only thing is, people didn't show up unannounced back then because they had something people today don't have. What is that called again? Oh yeah, manners.
And computers? Please. The computers back then were bigger than my house and cost 100 times more. Let me just put it this way, if you bought a calculator it cost $50 and all it did was add, subtract, multiply and divide. If you had the deluxe model it might take the square root of something. The Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eye.
Yeah, the kids today have everything and their parents had to mortgage everything they don't even own (read: mortgage crisis) to give it to them.
Two steps forward and three steps back.
Let's use a little restraint and common sense and get over ourselves and our need to own everything under the sun. Otherwise, we may not be around to see the sun.
3 comments:
Unfortunately it has been this way for far too long. During my college years (mid 80's) I had the eye-opening experience of driving a school bus. Even back then kids had so much to entertain them that they completely lost the ability to entertain themselves. While this may seem like just a minor nuisance for their parents (what did I buy you that [insert cool electronic gadget here] for if you are going to keep bothering me?), what it amounts to is an entire generation that has lost their imaginations. Is it any wonder that so much of the tech sector is moving overseas? It's not so much cost driven as it is the fact that we no longer have the imagination necessary to innovate. We're screwed.....
If you want more information on James' very point, check out a book by Daniel H. Pink called A Whole New Mind.
This is my fellow blogger and my first book club candidate and it speaks specifically to what James points out which is that we need to 'redevelop' our creative right brains to survive in the upcoming Conceptual Age.
Asia, Automation and Affluence will push us to innovate and empathize thus driving us out of the Information Age and into the Conceptual Age.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY OLD MAN!!!!!!
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