Some of you may recall my guest post on Lisa Nowak’s YA blog about kids these days. Fasten your seat belt because here we go again. I heard a comedian disrespect kids today as impatient with technology when we should be counting our blessings that we even have technology. I agree with the comic, however, I didn’t appreciate the way he chose to dismiss young people to make his point and garner a few laughs.
Admittedly, I’m a log jam in the flow of evolution, so indigenous and mammalian I won’t live long enough to experience any internal shift toward speed no matter how hard I try to force one. The seasonal rhythms have governed my life and the patterns are imprinted and set.
As a world population, we’re genetic cave persons. Only in the past century have our bodies been required to deal with electricity, land speed, air travel, woofers, lasers, microwaves … and velcro - ad infinitum. Society, technology, whatever ology out there is accelerating quicker than we’ve ever experienced as humans and genetically we’re scrambling to adapt. Some question whether our ethics are evolving as fast as our technology let alone our physical bodies.
Children are coming into the planet wired to keep up with their environment. Anyone under twenty is obviously smarter and faster than we are. They make connections and see solutions while we’re stuck on assessment and analysis. Each child has their unique genius. They know what they want and how to achieve their goals. Many of them are looking past their own self serving ends to make contributions on a world wide scale because of the technology available that makes connection possible.
Medication seems to be the current solution spearheaded by school systems and physicians. Slow kids down enough to dissect and understand the alien when what we really need is to allow them to show us how to integrate the light speed of a new way of being. The real issue is our ineffectiveness at managing all the tools and toys we’ve invented. How sane is that to create the monster and tell the people who might know how to tame the beast they need to be on drugs? In some cases, valid biological issues need to be addressed with medication. Our own envy and confusion when presented with these amazing Beings is not a good enough reason to drug our children.
Instructors tend to panic when a child thinks beyond their scope and thank heaven for gifted programs and educators with the foresight to implement them. Profound gratitude to the teacher who recognizes a child that seems slow may be operating at a frequency so fast we can’t even relate.
One of the reasons some doctors are so ready with the prescription pad is they don’t understand how to effectively mediate their own compassion so they prescribe for their patient in an attempt to ameliorate their personal pain when they’re not omnipotent and omniscient, or in other words, don’t know how to fix IT. Perhaps, it’s our approach and attitude that warrants fixing.
I have the good fortune to know amazing young people and children. One young woman is training to be an aerialist with the circus. When’s the last time any of us had the same nerve and discipline to live a dream? Or what about the six year old who broke open his piggy bank and gave the money to his mom when her purse was stolen? I was at a birthday party for a two year old recovering from cancer treatments. She noticed I didn’t have any cake so she scooped up some of hers with her tiny hand and plopped it on my plate. Where are we on the spectrum of giving so generously? If we’d open our eyes we’d see a great hope for our future in the children and young people around us who manage in their audacious purity to remind us to dust off our jaded ethics.
The comedian was preaching gratitude. How about some gratitude for these Beings who are showing us the way out of the mess we’ve made for them of the planet they’ve come to inhabit? At least as much as we’ll be able to muster as genetic dinosaurs.