Signs of the Times

I’ve just become acquainted with the Beloit College Mindset List, which is apparently a yearly ritual going on since 1998. It simply details what the mindsets of incoming freshmen are in a few details; this year, of course, they are detailing the mindsets of the class of 2014 at this Wisconsin liberal arts college. I had a few thoughts when reading it.

First off, as the opening blurb notes, this generation of children were “[b]orn when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage.” I read this with some degree of surprise and skepticism. Quick, I thought: subtract, carry the one…eighteen-year-olds were born in 1992? Really? Born after the Berlin wall came down, after the end of the entire Cold War, after the first war in Iraq was started, fought, and finished, and yet they’re old enough to vote and drive automobiles? Shocking, but true.

I’m sure older generations share the same thoughts about me, of course. “What?” they’d say. “You were born after the Vietnam war, and yet you can vote and drive cars?” And it’s a valid point; younger generations by nature remember different things than older. But this generation (as the subsequent parts of the report make clear) is both myopic and amnesiac, so its lack of memory of such minor world events as the forty-year nuclear standoff between America and Russia, as just one example, is particularly important.

Furthermore, these older generations and I were, mostly, born in the same era of history. My parents and I, for example, were both born during the Cold War. There were two Germanies and two Berlins, the latter of which were separated by a big wall, and people fairly regularly got shot trying to get across it. Having nuclear missiles pointed at us was a fact of life that we all took for granted. We were both aware of where the fallout shelters were located, though we rarely thought about it; we do, in fact, know what the fallout shelter sign looks like, and it was odd to neither of us. We both wrote papers for school in longhand (my first, anyway, though admittedly I was very young), we grew up familiar with the clack-clack-clack of typewriters, we didn’t get to use calculators in school (at least, not until pre-calculus), and we all knew how to draw graphs by hand. We’ve had to wait six to eight weeks for something we sent off for to arrive. We grew up listening to the radio (you know, radio that comes over the air, for free) and know what magnetic tape is. We both experienced the wonder that was cable television and the VCR when they became common (though again, I was young, I do clearly remember both). We both knew about film, both strips of film for playing movies and regular film for photographs. We’ve had to walk up to the television in order to change the channel, and we were both familiar with that giant metal mess on every roof in the neighborhood that picked up television signals. And so on.

Not so with this generation. They’ve never thought of Russia as an important world power; two Germanies is an alien thought to them, much less one Germany which is under an oppressive, dictatorial regime which shoots people for trying to get to the other one. If they know any physical recording medium, it’s CDs and CDs alone; most likely they’re more familiar with digital recording. They’ve never had to rewind magnetic tape onto reels; have never seen, much less used, film, either moving picture or regular picture; and have probably never seen a typewriter, certainly never actually used one. And so on.

This is a much more significant difference between my generation (I’m on the very tail end of mine, I think) and the next than there is between mine and my parents’. For this reason, I think it’s sometimes interesting and instructive to go through silly little surveys like this. I’ll go through it a piece at a time, skipping any bits I don’t think are interesting; hopefully I’ll get some comments.

Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

What a depressing characteristic. But it’s unquestionably true; indeed, only about half (at a guess) of my graduating class could write in cursive. I write in it exclusively; it’s just plain better than printing. Indeed, not long ago “writing” was cursive; printing was something different, something children did before they learned to write. But longhand is a vanishing art, it seems; a shame, since it’s an art that all can practice.

Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

This is one of the many instances of the mindset survey that gives one the impression of a generation of hyperactive impatients, and in some ways that’s exactly what we’ve got. Mail is very quick; when I was a child, sending away for things always took “six to eight weeks” according to the catalogues, and it really did. Now it takes a couple of days at most. And email is too slow? Really? One wonders what this generation is willing to wait for, if they’re willing to dedicate so little time and energy to communication that even email takes too long for them.

“Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.

Really? Among middle-upper class yuppies, maybe; the people I live with and work with couldn’t pronounce “macchiato,” much less know what it is. (I can pronounce it, but I’ve got neither an idea nor an inclination to acquire an idea of what it means.) Part of this is prejudice; my father taught me that coffee is coffee, and its purity should not be impugned by the additional of corruptive elements like cream, sugar, and other creative flavorings. (I’ve always, consequently, drunk it black.) But I question whether this is true. Our society (my generation and my parents’ not excepted) is becoming increasing coddled and corrupt, but I don’t think it’s so coddled and corrupt that we’re all willing to pay seven dollars for a hazelnut mocha latte, even if we do know what a “mocha” is.

Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.

Gah! Sad, but true. “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you? Punk?” I’ve never been a big fan of his westerns, but occasionally he produces something really great, like Gran Turino. It’s funny that nobody remembers Dirty Harry anymore, but I’ll confess that I can’t remember the last time I thought of him, either.

Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

Yes, when did this happen? They just sort of snuck up on us, I suppose. These days, the superiority of foreign cars is sadly a given, rarely questioned, Korean cars not excepted. The fact that these foreign cars owe their market successes in large part of favorable trade policies in Japan and Korea that America kindly refuses to reciprocate is neither known nor cared about by most. That, of course, isn’t limited by generation, either.

They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

That’s right! And they don’t know what rotary phones are, either! It’s getting common not even to have a landline phone. Anyone else remember when the idea of a pocketbook phone was risible?

Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.

More than that, they probably have never taken film in for development; instant gratification, all the way. But you used to not know what a picture would look like until days later, sometimes weeks. You’d take four or five pictures of everything to make sure at least one turned out right. And you only got thirty or so pictures on a roll; then you’d have to take that roll out and replace it. Don’t let the light shine on the film part, or you’ll lose it!

Not to mention stringing long strips of film into a film projector, so that you could watch a film with the sound obscured by the clattering of the motors as the film made its way from one reel to the other, and “rewinding” meant literally rewinding it back onto its original reel. Ah, those were the days!

Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.

Ha! Really? I was just a bit too young for the glam rock of the 80s (heard the older kids listening to it, of course), and in those heady days of my wasted youth I cut my teeth on Nirvana. I’m much too young for the popular music of my youth to be on an oldies station. Aren’t I?

Fortunately, I’ve found better music since.

Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.

What a miserable commentary on our society. We come from a great civilization, which has been producing great music for centuries; yet the repertoire of our people consists of the last fifty years of popular piffle produced by huge record companies solely in consideration of maximization of profit by taking advantage of a suddenly large and powerful youth demographic. And not only that, but even our highest political events are accompanied by this cacophonous wailing. Can’t we do better than this?

I must say that the generation following mine is actually better than mine in this matter; while their taste in music is little improved, if at all, they at least direct fashion in music rather than receiving it all passively, as my generation and my parents’ did. Nothing, after all, is all bad.

They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.

This is the most earth-shattering of all the differences; Russia is really just another country to the next generation, like Poland or Japan. Nothing interesting. I remember when Russia invaded Georgia recently, some younger people urging an immediate American military response to that invasion, scoffing at the possibility of war with Russia as no big deal. I was thunderstruck.

What? War with Russia is no big deal? That’s the nightmare scenario that’s been giving people the sweating terrors for decades! That’s end-of-the-world quality scary! We’re talking about worldwide desert, Mad-Max destruction here! Of course, they don’t know who Mad Max is, either.

But they have no recollection of such fears; even my generation has only a slight one, though it’s enough in general to make as at least aware that Russia remains a powerful country. (Sadly, some people want us to fight her anyway, despite knowing better; but that’s another question.)

Anyway, just some interesting tidbits. I’m aware that I’m probably not entirely typical for my generation; I remember clearly things that most people my age don’t, for example. But these are my thoughts. And note that I’m not doing a “these young whippersnappers” curmudgeonry here; I’m young enough that I can’t credibly do an imitation of a crotchety old man. I like computers and email; digital photography has many advantages over old-school film; I’m not a fan of rotary phones (remember how you used to hate calling people with lots of nines and zeroes in their numbers?); and so on. The next generation isn’t all bad, and overall isn’t any worse than my own or my parents’ (both of which are pretty bad, in a lot of ways). These are just off-the-cuff thoughts on a few issues raised by this little survey. Anyone else have any?

Praise be to Christ the King!