re: #244 FemNaziBitch

It’s also a matter of importance. What we think is terribly essential isn’t to them. I can think of similar things with my parents —events and topics that had no bearing and still have no bearing on my life.

Not to harp on the subject, but birth control is a big one. My moms generation never considered it in their lives. (Catholic) So it never figured into anything they thought or remembered. “So and so didn’t have to have all those children” —well, yes Mom, she did. Shit like that.

Or Dad tell me about stuff living without Rural Electricity and water from the well. I don’t need and will never need to know this stuff. Maybe if had become a civil engineer or worked at a water facility …

What happened in Carthage or Egypt or Greece 2000 years ago isn’t going to matter to most of these kids.

I’d like to think everyone could get a Classical Education and learn the ancient languages, but it is probably more important they learn to communicate with people on the other side of the planet and learn to accept other cultures.

Different young people are different, but what you say is largely true. My older son is interested in politics, and gets his jollies poking at Conservatives on FB, whereas the younger one makes fun of me for yattering on about “Conservatives this and Republicans that”. But when Mandela died, and the older one asked who he was, I realized something: Both of them grew up in a world without not only Apartheid, but also without the Soviet Union and the imminent danger of nuclear war that I’d lived with all my life.

The older one is interested in history (goes with an interest in politics), but somehow I think his view of the world vis a vis mine will be like the Dad whose kid dismissively referred to The Beatles as “Paul McCartney’s first group, before Wings”.