Fearing For The Next Generation, Needlessly

A GREAT AMERICAN TRADITION, indeed a great human-itarian tradition, is predicting the imminent collapse of civilization on account of the inevitable coming of age of that dread next generation. You know the drill: "kids these days are so disrespectful, stupid, lazy", or whatever else can be said to describe them negatively, "that when they take over, all hell's gonna break loose." I was guilty of it myself, starting in high school. I looked around the classroom at my peers, back in the early seventies, and thought: "Oh dear heavens, whatever is going to become of this world when we baby boomers start having and raising kids. We are ourselves such wild asses." Turned out I was wrong. My classmates, and my generation in general turned out fine, and the children of the baby boomers seem to be ambitious, courteous, successful, and all that. The grandchildren of the baby boomers are still too young for evaluation, but chances are they'll do just fine. The stereotypical dire warning about the near future always seems to be wrong, just like end of days prophecies. My sister, a baby boomer a bit older than I, doesn't think much of millennials. She says they're rude, self centered, blah blah, and I wholeheartedly disagree. I'm a big millennial fan; they are tending towards liberalism, and half of them are not religious. For me, that means they are brilliant. I want to tell my sister: "rude, you say? Hell, look who's talking". But I refrain, for the sake of family cohesion. But the other day a red flag went up for me. I pulled into Sonic, as I often do on Tuesday night, salivating about the soon to be gotten two big fully loaded cheeseburgers for the price of one. (I recommend it to all. Every Tuesday, after five.) I pushed the button, and said: "I would like two of your two for one cheeseburgers, please." The young lady responded: " no sir, they're half price"... To my credit , I didn't let that faze me. I must have had a bemused amused facial expression, but I simply said: "Oh, OK, I didn't know. Thanks". At a younger age, about a year ago, I would have smarted off, but I've grown. The girl in the speaker was probably in high school, therefore post millennial. She was probably busy, and had been all day. Probably tired. Probably wasn't thinking, or listening, and is probably not as stupid as it was tempting to think her to be. Whatever, I'm giving her a pass, and moving on. And I don't want to hear anything about the younger generation being unable to do basic math, or anything else, without a smart phone, a calculator, a computer, and an I Pad. Whether or not its true, I don't want to hear it. Because all I know is, whenever I need help figuring out something about a computer, I go looking for a fourth grader.