Kids Today Might Never Know – A Nostalgic Rant

Why do we need to learn history? It's so we won't make the same mistakes again. Think about it, if we didn't learn from our mistakes the Saints might be looking to draft a kicker in the first round of the NFL Draft. It happened once and it was an awful mistake. I'd like to think the lessons of experience would always come shining through. Sometimes a generation has no choice but to live in ignorance. That is what this mentally unbalanced rant is all about.

There is an entire generation of children that have no idea The Flintstones was an actual TV show. These young whippersnappers will only believe that Fred, Wilma, Dino, and Barney were only vitamins. They won't know why these stone models were chosen. They will simply know that their mom's gave them one each day to help keep their little fat butts healthier while they played video games.

There is an entire generation of young people that think George Foreman invented the electric grill. They have no idea that at one time George was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. He possessed the power to relieve a man of his conscious being with one punch. Today's kids only know George as the guy whose grill lets the fat run down the grill and on to the counter because somebody lost that little plastic tray.

While most of us older folks struggle to remember whether we took our pills this morning today's generation will never know how to remember a phone number. I know I've lost that ability. I used to know hundreds of phone numbers and now I have to stop and think what my own telephone number is. We simply share a contact or put a number in our smart phones just one time. We never have the need to remember it. Unless of course we lose our phone, the battery is dead, or God forbid we have to borrow some old man's flip phone.

I think kids of this generation and beyond will never know the sheer terror of being lost. The kind that comes from taking a turn off the main road and having to stop at a gas station for directions. It was in these situations we learned how to read the position of the sun and the stars. We learned how to check for the moss on the side of trees. We learned how to read a real live hard to fold map. The smart phone of today with its GPS might lead the novice driver directly into a flooded rock quarry but at least they won't know the panic of being stuck in the middle of nowhere.

When technology makes everyone sing great, there will be no more great singers. I kind of paraphrased the movie The Incredibles with that one. With Auto-Tune and today's technology any person that can make sound come out of his or her mouth can be the next popular music superstar. There once was a time when singers hit notes and sang in musical keys and had ideal phrasing and they romanced a melody. Today a machine does all that for these wanna be wonders of the modern music world.

Don't get me wrong. I am not technophobe nor do I dislike learning new and better ways of doing things. It's just that some lessons need to be learned from experience. Some stories are better told around a campfire than a computer screen, and there is no substitute for a handwritten letter of thanks. Go ahead call me old and out of touch, it's probably what I am but what I need to be. Once upon a time I too was cool and hip, now I'm simply wiser and harder to impress.