“Kids These Days!”
Linda Nicholas
I had an extended conversation with a friend the other day, and then covered the same topic in a visit with another friend the next day. The topic was ‘young people’. Like every generation before us we expressed disgust and horror, and a certainty that they may never survive. They are disrespectful, and arrogant, foolish and foolhardy, totally disregarding the values and ethics and downright hard work of the parents…..yada yada yada…
Of course you probably have heard this too…. all they do is sit around staring obliviously at one technological device or another, and more shockingly totally disregard the value of the devices, ie. HOW MUCH THEY COST! One story was a young person laughing that his friend had lost or destroyed four cell phones over the course of a year or so. My adult friend was astonished that the teenager remembered the exact makes, models and specs of each of his friend’s phones that were lost or destroyed, and was not floored by the cost of replacing these gadgets but was actually envious that his schoolmate kept upgrading with each replacement.
We were jointly shocked that each of these phones would have cost 300 to 800 dollars each to replace. I have stories just like this, I imagine you do too. We despair that we are leaving our world to vegetables rather than vegetarians.
The more I thought about this it occurred to me that each generation needs to have what it takes to survive. What will they need and what will their worries be when we are no longer here? Will they lament that there is no free fresh air or free clear clean water? Will their fashion be self- contained survival suits in an endless variety of color and style?
Their view of money is already unrecognizable to us. Our own view of money is already pretty much unrealistic. The paper notes we have always accepted as being backed by gold value has been a false representation for nearly our whole lives. What we deal in today is plastic and numbers that is backed by what? The use of ‘hard cold cash’ is down to bare minimum, people rarely ever have more than one or two hundred dollars cash at any given time, but the norm is ten to twenty dollars. The vast majority of our ‘products’ are produced in a country on the other side of our world. What is produced in our country is shipped to some other country. Are our houses built with wood cut from our own forests, that our wild life depend upon to live?
I would guess no. The only chance we would have to interact with New Brunswick cut wood, would be if we are hit by a pulp truck as it is sweeping it off to be sold somewhere else…
We get plastic and compressed sawdust to build houses, ‘products’ that requires specialist to make it work. Those $800 phones and computers that our hard earned marks (not money, an IOU) are used to pay for are all made somewhere else. Our canned and processed food is all grown and processed somewhere else. Our vegetables and meat are all grown and SHIPped from somewhere else.
Let’s not even think about what is actually put into those “food products”. Notice not even just FOOD….. food products! I have heard horror stories on Market Place about the garbage that goes into dog food, wow. If you really knew what actually goes into the “food products” we consume you would lose your lunch!
Make no mistake our Pacific coast DOES have radioactive waste washing up on the shores. ALL life in the Pacific Ocean is now contaminated. The Gulf of Mexico will be dead for so long a period of time, that it will never recover even in our grandchildren’s lives. The Mississippi river has so many oil spills that it actually catches on fire periodically and burns. Most of the mid-west is a wasteland that was created by fracking. California , and Arizona will be in drought conditions yet again this year, and will burn some more. AND Nestle wants to pass laws in CANADA that will make it illegal for us Canadians to own our own water.
What water? Geological fracturing is cocked and ready to fire at New Brunswick. The oil pipeline is rumbling towards us. You have no say over who is going to urinate (if only it were ONLY urine!) in your own back yard.
Hmmmmmm. Which rant shall we employ for this coffee break?
One thing is certain, those children will need their technology, and their biological adaptation to chemicals, and artificial food, hydroponics, and filtered reconstituted water (reverse osmosis water) because at the rate we are headed they will not have a world to live in.
I am thinking their contempt for money is their concession to something we have harped on and on about…. greed and power that sort of thing. Maybe they will find a better way. Maybe we should be asking those young people for help. Or maybe we should be fighting harder to leave them something to thank us for. Or maybe all the above.
