Note to My Daughter, Which She Will Never Read

[madrobins]

It isn't that your opinions on politics are either more or less valid just because you and your generation are young. It's that coming to those opinions is a new (to you), and exciting sensation. As it should be. Those opinions are therefore shinier than any of the old shopworn opinions of an aged parent. A thing to consider some time when you have

Comments

[malkingrey]

Some things never change. My late father still had, decades afterward, the note cards for his 1937 high school valedictory speech, in which he -- you guessed it -- pointed out what a mess the world was in, and informed the previous generations assembled that it was Their Fault that his generation was going to get stuck with fixing it.

Which, to be sure, they did. Some stuff, but not all of it, as you said of our own generation. And in the predictable way of such things, the unfixed stuff lay around and festered, and time and world events generated new stuff to lie on top of it, so there we were . . . and there the kids are now, because of the inevitable persistence of stuff.

[sartorias]

I was reading Erasmus's letters a week or two back. He was going on about the obnoxiousness of know-it-all kids, back in the 1500s.

[nineweaving]

Erasmus, the Greeks and Romans ... Kids today! goes back to the dawn of homo sapiens.

Nine

[nineweaving]

Sigh. I'm sorry she made your head ache. As a weary old pragmatist, I empathize. And raise an eyebrow at anyone promising to build the City on a Hill on the foundations we have, of landfill, toxic waste, and noble ruins.

Nine

[desperance]

Before coffee? Unconscionable. I am tolerably sure that kids today lack a conscion button.

[madrobins]

We had one installed when she was young, but I think she ripped it out.