Today's Generation

I worry about the generations of today, (insert "Back in my day" story here) this generation has never know all that we had when we were growing up and all of the things that we learned and saw along the way. Now I am only 27 so please forgive me to the older generations who have gone through by far more than I have ever known. I was in the in between generation, cell phones were first introduced when I was in Elementary school, but didn't go main stream until I was in middle school we had pagers before that...remember those?! Computers were just starting to come into homes as well, our first one was in our living room. Before we had home internet, I remember sitting on it and playing my Beauty and the Beast game and my Sesame Street game. If you were to show a floppy disk to a teenager today, they wouldn't believe that we actually had to save our home work on that! We stayed outside and played until the sun went down or we were called for supper. We had remotes for our TV's but we still had one that you actually had to get up and walk to, to change the channel. Game boys were as thick as bricks and only in black and white. Nintendo's were still connected to the game console with cords and if you needed to call someone on the road you had to find a payphone.
Ok I could go on and on about the things we did without unlike now generations, but I digress. One of the many things that worry me about these younger generations is their relativity to history. I love history. I am obsessed with history, mainly US history though. And today is the 50th anniversary of the assignation of John F. Kennedy. I know that I was no where near being even thought of 50 years ago today, and both my parents were only 8 years old at the time of death of the president, but this moment in history is such a turn of events that I became fascinated with, and I worry that things like this that happened in history are going to be lost generation after generation.
My love for history started in 7th grade when I had the privilege of having Mrs. Farkas for a history teacher at Allen Jay Middle school. Now Mrs. Farkas was not your ordinary teacher by any means. You know Ms. Frizzle in the Magic School Bus series? That was Mrs. Farkas. Just a more hippy, stuck in the 70's Ms. Frizzle! She loved to talk about two things during the year, One was ancient Egypt and mummification, we even had to create our own tomb. The other historical subject was the assignation of JFK. Now most people have seen the famous Zapruder film, the home video that captures the moment the president was shot. To my surprise my husband had never seen it, or he saw it and just didn't remember it. We watched it in class, over and over and over again. It was nothing new to see, the fatal shot or shots (in my opinion), we also went over all of the conspiracy theories (it was one, by the way), and watched all of the documentaries that came out years after, we also looked at pictures to help my belief that it was all a conspiracy.
But it made me wonder when my husband seemed surprise at the footage, once the older generations are gone, will our history be gone? Now I know that is a little extreme to say but it really makes me wonder. The schools and history books will still teach it and there will forever be the pictures and video to refer to, but will it just be a section in a book?
The same makes me wonder about the horrific events of September 11th 2001. It blows my mind (and make me feel old) that many teens and kids weren't around or were just too young to remember it. It was a day that will forever be etched in my mind, much like the attack on Pearl Harbor, or the assignation of JFK for older generations. I was changing classes in the 10th grade when I first heard the news, at first I thought it was a joke. I mean come one who would fly a plane into the pentagon? When entering yearbook class, is when I first saw the TV and the footage that was scrolling across the screen. Tears starting streaming down my face when the first tower fell. Just months before I had stood before them and my cousin and I had decided not to go up to the museum at the top, because we both agreed that "they would be there next year".
Maybe its because I actually saw it all happen, maybe its because I been at the top of those buildings, maybe its because of the events on that terrible day, so many brave men and women decided to enlist in the armed forces and because of this, many of them never came home. But this day stuck with me, I had become apart of history.
Now off of MY historical history review and onto my topic...Today's Generation. I cam across an article right after Halloween about a girl who dressed up like a Boston Marathon victim, I won't re-post the picture because I myself found it disgusting and disgraceful to the actual victims of the bombing attack. She is 22, old enough to know better. Upon reading this article I also came across another couple of 19 year old's who dressed up like the burning twin towers...disgusting, I know. Is this what we are going to have to look forward to in future generations, such disgust and disrespect? It's a hard generation to come into, everything is given to you in a hurry up fashion. Think about it, when you need to find out who the 23rd president was, you simply go to the computer or grab your phone type it in and BAM Benjamin Harrison pops up. Now think about to the time when you were growing up, what did you have to do? I remember pulling out the encyclopedia that my parents had purchased from someone go door to door selling, and flipping to the index to find where the presidents were located, then flipping to that page and reading down till I found the answer. Not that I am complaining because I find it incredible useful to pull up directions on the road and have them spoken to me rather than looking at a map and trying to decipher which way to go.
Because of this hurry up and all of this information available at our fingertips what happens to the imagination? Kids don't play make believe like they use to, I saw plenty of examples when working in childcare. Rather they are too consumed with TV shows or games that they can play on their tablets, or phones, or game consoles. What will happen when they have to think out of the box? What do we as older generations do to help make sure that they still live in the imaginary worlds that we once played in?
I came across this post on Facebook and fell in love! If its what Pat and I need to do to make sure our kids have an imagination then that's what we will do! Check it out!

So in a world that is growing up in a Miley and Justin Beiber world....here's hoping for the best