A bowl of cereal is, I am told, too inconvenient for many millennials. One is left with a bowl and there is the trouble of pouring the milk. Now I have no great love for most of the cereal industry, though Peanut Butter Captain Crunch is gourmet eating, but this is, as my grandparents would have said, a sad sack thing.
If cereal is inconvenient, life is going to be hellishly difficult for you.
Today I had to order an Uber to get to the airport. This was a two step process and I also had to carry my bags to the car. When I got to the airport, the phone would not get my boarding pass and so I was forced to paper…paper still with me at this moment with no trash receptacles in view. My laptop battery died so I am writing this on a tablet using buggy Southwest in-flight internet. Southwest required several steps to get online.
This is my first world life with a grown up job.
The longer I teach the more I see students afraid of complexity. Take politics. Nobody belongs to a political party because they agree with everything it does. Having an impact is messy and at the end of the process there is more than a dirty cereal bowl to clean.
We are none of us, perfect, so what the Victorians called “social intercourse” is complicated. Nobody is good and nobody is evil in the totality of their life. I think President Obama is a failed President and a poor leader, but there are things he has done that are good and things about him I like.
Of course, the simple thing to do when facing the complexity of cereal is just to quit eating it. Obama is imperfect, I will just not talk about him ever. If my generation’s version of stupid is to become fierce unthinking partisans, too often this generation avoids knowing anything about difficult things. The right disposition is key. Don’t get worked up.
Abortion is disturbing and evil. Don’t get worked up. After all, didn’t some on the right get hateful about it…or something? Such conversations are often fact free as students only care about not getting worked up and avoiding complexity.
Of course, my students at The Saint Constantine School think, embrace challenges, and work hard. They are depressed by how little peers do…not activities…people are burning out on activities …or vice, this generation is relatively well behaved compared to mine.
They face a peer group of the worst sort who have badly formed ideological zeal and of the best who conform to the gods of the mainstream. Edgy too often is choosing a minority OS for phone and courage is working for a cause whose history is only dimly understood, if at all.
My grandparents beat the Depression and Hitler and figured out Cornflakes. My parents whipped inflation and defeated Soviet tyranny while washing out a bowl used for Coco Puffs. My generation and my children’s can grow the economy, defeat Daesh, and do it over a bowl of Golden Grahams.
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