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In roughly fifteen years, our generation – a band of supposedly apathetic, uninspired, and privileged brats – will drastically change our country for the better. Without really trying.
We will renovate the country, and, assuming we’re still a superpower in 2022, the world, because we will know better than our parents and grandparents did. The Information Age has brought with it certain pros (Google, online encyclopedias, friends for people who feel uncomfortable making friends) and certain cons (facebook stalking, pictures of Britney’s nether nakedness), but it will undoubtedly leave us knowing more, and knowing better, than any previous generation.
As graduation presents to my college friends, my mom chose to hand out DVDs instead of money clips or photo albums. We all received the same DVD, one called What the #$*! Do We Know?, which seemed to imply that four years of college hadn’t alleviated our collective, devastating stupidity. (I suggested an alternative title for the film: You Morons Don’t Know $#!+ Yet.)
But turns out the DVDs weren’t so much an expose of our ignorance as they were an examination of quantum physics, and the boost in self-confidence that science has given to hippie scientist/spiritualists, and how going to a wedding and listening to bad disco music can positively affect the mood of a surly deaf woman.
While the discussion of spiritualism was interesting, my mom was most blown away, and I was least blown away, by the physics. This was the first time she had seen inside atoms, understood that electrons kind of appear and disappear at their whim, and realized how much wide open space there is in the matter that makes up our beds, airplanes, and bodies.
I, like my peers, had gleaned all this information from boring fifth grade textbooks. I have always known about sub-atomic particles, which means I have always been indifferent to them, which means I have always chosen to spend my science classes flipping to the textbook’s dinosaur pages and drawing goatees on velociraptors.
But you can imagine how earth-shattering quantum physics would be if you were learning it as a fifty-something-year-old who had always assumed that her body was a solid object, constructed from molecular brick mortared to molecular brick. Knowing how much nothing there is in your every atom might make you feel empty inside, vacant, or like you should be able to walk through walls, but just can’t.
Last summer I read a book called A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson, which entertainingly reviews everything I ever learned in high school science classes. Again, Bryson’s facts were old to me, but new to him for the most part, because when he went to school, the word “subatomic” didn’t exist, and there were no velociraptors on which to draw goatees because Steven Speilberg was yet to make Jurassic Park.
Recently I watched Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore’s science was relevant, and in many ways, scary, but I had seen it all before in my college Environmental Studies course. Gore’s movie and Bryson’s book are like What the #$*! Do We Know?: They’re less for us than they are for our parents. They’re CliffsNotes on everything that we learned (and they didn’t) in high school and college.
So the alternate title I had given to my mom’s gift - You Morons Don’t Know $#!+ Yet - revealed itself to be way off. What she was really saying was, I Can’t Believe You Morons Already Know This $#!+.
We know more than our parents do because we have been handed more volumes to digest. We are in an age of information after all, and we young people are supposed to be the pioneers, even if it’s only because we’re better typists and mouse-operators. Or maybe that’s under-selling our capacity to absorb knowledge. Since infanthood our minds have been performance-enhanced by pre-school Spanish, SAT prep courses, and Ritalin. We eat $#!+ for breakfast.
Yes, our parents have had invaluable life experiences, character-building hurdles to overcome, and a mastery of home economics that we won’t acquire until we’re putting our own kids through college, but we have the power of wikipedia.
If we agree that we know more, where do we go from there? How do we turn knowing more into knowing better?
I, for one, vow to be more tolerant of older people. Let us forgive our elders, especially those who have the power to write and manipulate laws, not for their negligence or stupidity, but for their ignorance.
Nobody ever taught our parents about global warming, potential energy crises, or gay people, so asking them to correctly address those issues is like asking a third grader to write a footnoted essay on the migration habits of the African Yellow Green Zebra. The third grader will be understandably confounded because A) “migration” is a difficult word, and B) the African Yellow Green Zebra does not exist except on old Fruit Stripe gum wrappers.
We might question our predecessors’ problem-solving abilities, the way they have run our country, and the way they have invaded others. Or we might have faith in our system, our Constitution’s guiding vision, and their combined leadership in showing us how to kick ass. But whether you believe in our national approach to problem-solving or not, what is clear is that our problem-solvers don’t properly understand today’s problems. In other words, even if the third grader knew what “migration” meant, and even if he knew how to write a footnoted essay, he would still run into road block when he looked up “African Yellow Green Zebra.” His analytical skills may be perfect, but he can’t analyze a problem that he doesn’t understand.
We can blame our congress and our president and all our previous congresses and presidents for their blunders (as I’ve been prone to do), or we can patiently wait for them to learn what we’ve learned, or else move on, retire, grow old. We can explain to them that the African Yellow Green Zebra doesn’t exist, and so to analyze its migration habits requires a feat of imagination.
At some point in our nation’s history, most voters and government officials believed that all men were created equal. They didn’t, however, count minorities as men, and they didn’t even bother worrying about how women were created. Their approach to a problem was a good one – they wanted everyone to be equal. But they didn’t really understand the problem – there was more everyone than they realized.
One can’t imagine the answer to a problem without knowing the full problem, and this is the issue that confronts our elders – most of them just don’t know what we know.
When scientists figure something out, it takes a while for everyone else to believe them. Maybe this is a good thing; scientists are frequently wrong, as evidenced by their one-time belief that the world was flat, or by the time they sent Bruce Willis and his merry band of oil drillers to blow up an approaching asteroid.*
But when scientists do agree upon a fact, they must drill that fact through layers of public skepticism. Decades ago the FDA announced that cigarettes caused lung cancer, but people still smoke, states still allow patrons to puff in bars, and my friend Chris still thinks the anti-smoking campaign is a hoax.
Here’s a graph to explain how science works its way into society’s conscience:
Section A is where scientists figure something out. Section B is where some older people who read Science and Nature start to believe them. In Section C, teachers begin to inform their students of the scientific findings, but it’s not until Section D, when those students come of age, begin voting and running for office, and when their parents get too old to fight against popular opinion, that the scientific fact becomes widely embraced.
Right now, our country is in an across-the-board Section C. Because of the explosion of information, there are hundreds of issues that we should all agree upon, but don’t. Not yet, anyway.
Young people are still learning, they’re still underage, or they’re still too lazy to vote or speak up. So for the time being, we still have older, maybe wiser, but not necessarily better informed people making the decisions. Our country still doesn’t know any better.
It’s not just scientific facts that take time to spread – it’s social movements, too. The belief that the “All men” in “All men are created equal” should include blacks, whites, Native Americans, and people who weren’t men at all, began within a small group of radicals. Those radicals recruited semi-radicals, and then non-radicals, until they had enough mainstream pull to act.
Here’s what our generation has grown up knowing (and conversely, what other generations have grown up NOT knowing):
-That you can use a computer to surf the Internet, shoot aliens, and make friends, online and officially, with rural Australians
-That political correctness is something that we have to embrace, and that we should be tolerant of all types, even geeks, gays, and anyone else who has ever been stereotyped
-That there are even smaller things than atoms
-That there are a large number of people on the other side of the world who hate us
-That we are going to run out of oil pretty soon
-That the environment is fragile, and that we’re at fault
Obviously older people, especially those in the government business, have heard about all that stuff. But they weren’t taught it from a young age, so many of them will never fully believe it, just as someone who learns a foreign language as an adult, no matter how proficient they become, will never be 100% accent-free.
But our generation, most of it anyway, does believe all that stuff. We believe that gay people, even if they make us uncomfortable, are people. We believe that it’s wrong to drop bombs on countries just to see if one of our bombs strike oil. And we’re pretty sure that waterfront property in Iowa will be a wise investment if we don’t start building more fuel-efficient cars.
We’re not any smarter than previous generations. We were just taught better (and that, by the way, would only be possible with the help of the enlightened radicals from previous generations).
Probably nothing. Not at first, maybe not ever. Most people view our generation as bored, listless, uninterested. That might be wrong, but we haven’t exactly stood up for ourselves yet.
However, the problems that face our country may not require courage or activism. They might just require knowledge and imagination. The Greatest Generation is so named because they turned themselves into heroes, fighting villains abroad, creating industry domestically, and making babies determinedly. They acted, risked their lives, and became great. But we might be able to sit on our asses, and as crazy as it sounds, accomplish even more.
Our generation will someday find inspiration, catch fire, reach compassionate, not military, arms toward the world and lead Earth toward friendly Universe domination. I believe we’ll do all that, and it won’t even be that hard. We’ll succeed by knowing more. We’ll succeed by knowing better.
*This plan worked, but it shouldn’t have.
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