Monday, June 9, 2014

...they say that you're stupid...

Kids, that is.   They reach a certain age - in my daughter's case, 14 - and suddenly and unexpectedly, you are the stupidest person who ever walked the earth.   You say the sun is yellow, they say it's orange.  If it's the 15th of July and 90 degrees out and you declare that summer has "finally arrived", they will argue that "summer starts on June 21st" in a voice heavily dripping with disgust, as if you'd just declared Pepsi illegal.

At some point, they reverse course and give you hope.  They're not quite so sensitive and critical of every blessed word that escapes from that hole in the front of your face.  You start enjoying each other's company again.  Don't buy it.

At the risk of sounding like some refugee from the set of the Golden Girls, this millennial generation is exactly what the media says it is.  Hyper-sensitive.  Not rebellious like the Boomers or complacent like the Gen-X'ers.   They are absolutely not happy to hear anything critical or anything resembling advice from someone older that could be construed as criticism.  And their answer to criticism is to somehow shame the offender into shutting up or to argue down the offender until he or she is so exhausted that the logical advice no longer sounds logical, because -after all- nobody over the age of 30 knows what in the hell they're talking about.  Because everybody knows that everything you ever needed to know about life and life's lessons are learned primarily on college campuses across the USA.

What I can't figure out is this - what in the world are these 21 year old paragons of wisdom and knowledge going to do with the rest of their lives that could possibly compare to the epic experiences of college life?  Once you've experienced utopia, what else is there in life that will instill the same worldly and deep-reached knowledge?  

When you reach the pinnacle with an estimated 60 years of life still in front of you, how do you cope with the inevitable letdown?  I'm not really sure if I want to be around to find out.