Wikipedia says that one definition of Narcissism can mean egotism, vanity, conceit or simple selfishness. While I don’t like to admit that I often use Wikipedia, lets face it, where the youth of today are concerned, the synonym for narcissism that best fits is simply selfishness.
Yeah, yeah – I know that young people need a healthy self-love and a good ego or the world would have died off a long time ago. But many older civilizations managed to instill in their youth a certain level of respect for the wisdom that living to old age implied.
After all, in early times, by the time a male reached the age of 18 they could be considered an “elder”, and living much past 20 was likely unheard of, so the fact that a tribal elder managed to evade the sabertooth tiger long enough to become an elder demanded a certain level of respect from the younger men. An early version of not reinventing the wheel, so to speak, although this was likely well before someone actually invented the wheel.
What prompted this was an article in the Daily Mirror on the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Several young people apparently were completely unaware that the Titanic was a real ship, full of real people, that actually sank, killing most of the passengers aboard. They thought it was a movie.
This article is close on the heels of an article in the L.A. Times that asks whether or not the median viewer age of 48 for American Idol means that the kids have been lost. It goes on to bemoan that the judges are old and the music is old, all as if this were a bad thing.
When did we become a society where the good things from the past were something we were ashamed of and tried to hide in the closet? What does it say about us when our youth aren’t familiar with or interested in history? Why is it so important for our youth to chase down the latest cool fad, losing interest in whatever they were passionate about just last month?
OK, the world won’t end because a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears kids aren’t aware that the Titanic was a real ship, or because American Idol features songs from Billy Joel, who was popular before most of todays current contestants were even born. I’m being a bit melodramatic I suppose.
But, when I was a kid, surrounded by my elders, I became quite familiar with the things of their youth. I listened to Hoagy Carmichael, Glenn Miller, Hank Williams, Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby. We watched the Ed Sullivan show, the Lawrence Welk Show and the Wonderful World of Disney. All of this in the 1960’s when the landscape of America was moving radically to the left with the British Invasion of the Beatles and other bands, and the rise of our awareness about Civil Rights.
I was also interested in these new things, just like my peers, but I would never have thought to be disrespectful of the past as it seems to many of todays youth are eager to do. I was allowed just enough freedom to be young and free, but still taught, in many not so obvious ways, that just because something was old didn’t mean it was bad, worthless or not worthy of any of my attention.
Why are we letting our young people be so ignorant of the past? It’s not their fault you know. It’s ours. We are the elders, and we have abandoned our responsibility to the youth of our tribe.
Excellent post! Learning from the past seems to be losing its value, at least in America, and it’s a bit scary that we may be doomed to reapeat mistakes that the young don’t care enough to remember. JB