I realize that every older generation looks down upon the younger generation and shudders to think that the world is going to “hell-in-a-hand basket” to quote my late grandmother. But I have to wonder if that’s what every older generation thought of the next batch of up-and-comers?
The latest Newsweek (June 2, 2008) has an article entitled: The Dumbest Generation? Don’t Be Dumb.
It concerns a book written by an Emory University professor about how “the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future (or don’t trust anyone under 30).
I have to admit that I am amazed that the young interns who blow through NBC5 every semester claiming they want to be the next “Katie Couric,” couldn’t tell you who Lee Harvey Oswald was nor do they have any inkling to the significance of November 22, 1963.
I recently chastised a young intern after we drove past the historic Texas Theatre in Oak Cliff and she could not tell me why that building was historically important. She got an earful about Oswald’s arrest and the murder of a Dallas Police Officer named J. D. Tippet that occurred just minutes before the arrest and minutes after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
I told her if she expected to be a reporter in this market she had better “D#*n well” have those events seared into her sub consciousness.
Of course, “she just looked at me uncomprehendingly, like a cow at a passing train” to quote Don Henley.
The truth is she probably doesn’t know who Don Henley is either for that matter.
Recently, a P.R. woman at a large Fort Worth Hospital, who has to be approaching 30 and is married, asked if I had “interviewed anyone famous lately?” I proudly said, ”Why, yes, Dan Aykroyd!” She looked at me with that blank stare. I mean, come on, do you want to tell me this woman has never heard of the “Bass-O-Mastic” nor seen “Ghostbusters”?
I didn’t exactly grow up in the Andy Griffith era, but I can whistle that opening credits tune as well as anybody with the black and white image of Andy and Opine loping off on a cane-pole fishing trip. And by being aware of current events, I can also tell you the man who composed that catchy tune, Earle Hagen, recently passed away at age 88.
The same thing occurred when an intern asked an NBC photojournalist about any Celebes he had recently met, when he replied “ZZ Top” she became the proverbial deer-in-headlights.
What blows me away about that one is ZZ just appeared on American Idol with the show’s newly crowned winner, David Cook.
I recently met a fascinating woman, 42 years old and an attorney, who is an expert on World War 2.
I have not asked her when she became enamored with the subject but I would imagine it was when she was in her teens or early 20′s.. But again, that’s a topic most women of the post baby-boomer age couldn’t give a kraut-rats about.
Being a music buff,I can rattle on ad-nauseum about how the Carter Family and Jimmy Rogers practically invented country music...leading to Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a truck driver from Tupelo to develop the “Rock and Roll” sound.
Often times when I’m trying to impress the younger generation with such knowledge, I get the obligatory scoff and incredulous sneer about, “How do I now about all of this?”.
That’s when I jump on my soap box about how ignorance is not bliss,and pull those earbuds out of your head and learn something about the past.
The “Dumbest Generation” book laments about how “George Santayana, too, despaired of a generation‘s ignorance,” by warning that, ‘“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’”
And, that was in 1905!
So, I guess at this point I should just rest my case.
Later
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