Kids-these-days-with-their…

I often hear (or read) people opine that pre-teens and teens today have a wealth of information resources that “we” (with a vague referent) would have loved.  And I often hear people bemoan and bewail the loss of erudition in communication between “today’s youth”.  But something is often missed, I think.

We all — any “we” — said stupid stuff when we were kids.  We parroted stuff from our parents or other kids without thinking through it; we said self-serving lies; we were arrogant and brash; we (I would wager everyone) said things that disparaged entire groups.  Elaborating on the last one: although I consider myself, in retrospect, to have been more sensitive than many of my peers, I blanch at the memories of remarks that I made that sexualized classmates; at the gay jokes; at the Mexican jokes.  Yes, I did these mostly to fit in.  Every young person in history has done these things, to some degree or other, for the same reasons, because youth is a time when we have not yet formulated our identities, and we are trying on various ones to see if any fit.  Show me the man who acts as an adult the way he did as a child, and I’ll show you the man in prison.

But when I said such things, or when those born before (perhaps) the mid 1980s to early 1990s said them, they were spoken, to be heard by our peers — the ones we were trying to impress — and there is no record of them.  But when it’s done today, it can be forever.  An email or text message can be shared or archived, and I’m assuming many of those will come back to bite people later.  But a tweet or a Facebook status update or a blog post or (beware, kids) a YouTube comment will, with near-certainty, be archived on some hard drive or other and be digitally accessible in some fashion in perpetuity.

I was thinking of citing a number of examples I have seen recently of brash, arrogant, abusive, unthoughtful, and just idiotic things I had seen online — the items that made me think to write this post — but I needn’t, because every person reading this has his or her own examples.  But I don’t expect it will be any easier to teach kids to be careful to not write these things down, even when “all the kids do”, than it is to teach kids that they don’t need to say these things, even when “all the kids do”.

That’s because the “all the kids do” phenomenon is a manifestation of all kids going through the same awkwardness and fear and experimentation and self-definition together.  Adults know this, and they try to tell kids this, and the kids don’t believe them, because rather than realizing they’re discovering a world, they’re convinced that they’re inventing it.  That’s fine, they’re kids.  They are never going to grasp the real extent that their parents (and grandparents, and distant ancestors) went through the same stuff about sex, and peer pressure, and drugs, and bullies, and school, and criminal impulses, and masturbation, and suicide, and on and on and on.  As usual, Ed Vedder from Pearl Jam said it better than I: “The young, they can lose hope ’cause they can’t see beyond today; wisdom that the old can’t give away.”

I have now realized I have no idea of my target audience for this post.

• If you’re an adult:  I’m right, yeah?
• If you’re a teen:  Don’t put anything on the web that you wouldn’t want on your college admission or job applications.  You won’t listen to that advice, of course, but keep it in your mind for the stuff that might really come back to get you.
• If you’re a random kid/preteen:  You don’t belong on this site.  But, meh, you’re going to figure out how to read what you want.  Your mom and dad know this too.  Welcome to the world of “open secrets”.
• If you’re my kid/preteen:  There’s more on this site than I probably would have wanted to know about my father until I was in my twenties.  But if you’re here, and you’re reading all of this, you’ll know a lot about me.  We’re all — you, me, the world — in it together.  And I’m always here to talk.  No judgments.  Ever.