SAGE ADVICE: Kids these days

By MARK SAGE/Columnist

Consider my faith restored.
Those who have to spend a lot of time with me – and the operative words are “have to” – know that I’ve got something of a sick obsession with generational issues. Specifically, I wonder often and aloud what the kids, as I like to call them, have brought the world except sunny dispositions formed by everyone getting a trophy every time, poor spelling enhanced by text messaging and emoticons. My age group, granted, hasn’t contributed a whole lot to the world, if you don’t count caustic irony and the ability to see a brimming over mug as soon to be half empty. We did give birth to Nirvana, The Melvins and Soundgarden, which just happened to save rock music from a hair band death. As far as music goes, you can do a lot worse than Soundgarden, which is a lot like Led Zeppelin only not quite as good. The kids, as I like to call them, though, took Soundgarden, Zeppelin and all and sacrificed them on the altar of lip-synced bubblegum pop.
But I’m ready to eat all those not-so-nice words I’ve uttered against the kids, as I like to call them. Northwood’s kind of changed my mind.
There are some sharp kids there. They keep up with things. They know what’s going on in the world. They’ve got opinions that aren’t dipped in caustic irony and fried on a skillet of angst-heavy rock.
I got invited to speak at the high school and share my experiences as a person who uses words every day, or something of that nature. I ended up talking more about giant particle colliders and the doomsdayers who love them and whether we should send troops to a place Ray Charles didn’t make popular in song. I’m not so good at that sort of thing, you know, talking on point.
Along the way I learned a whole lot more than I taught. I learned that the kids graduating this year were exactly 10 when we were all scared that Y2K might erase our abilities to listen to bootleg recordings of Soundgarden. I learned, though, that they wouldn’t have worried one bit about such nonsense, no matter what the IT guy thought back then. He didn’t, after all, grow up using computers, the way they did. He probably didn’t even have any trophies.
It’s refreshing, especially as a newspaper person, to get out and speak to real young people, the kind with flesh and blood and opinions that aren’t necessarily part of the monolith my cousins in the bigger media construct. Turns out the kids, as I like to call them, aren’t all the same. They don’t drink from the same trough of pabulum, even if they have made it famous through lip-syncing, baby-birthing and wardrobe-malfunctioning.
The students at Northwood restored my faith in humanity. They can talk intelligently about world and national events. They read the papers, a plus at a time when no one else does, at least according to my cousins in the larger media. And then they form opinions. That’s what got me. The opinions they formed weren’t formed for them by some faceless pop star or media outlet. They were weighed, measured and insightful, for the most part. They didn’t necessarily resolve anything Friday or reach some magical consensus we always hear so much about. But they discussed things rationally, with supporting evidence, gasp, and disagreed, to be a little trite, without being disagreeable.
Only three or four out of a class of 16 will be able to vote this November.
It’s a shame.
Contact Mark Sage at 228-6611 or .