Thursday, February 12, 2009
Opinion: Generation gap
When I came back to MSUM after a few years off, I expected to feel a disconnect from the younger people in a few of my classes. What I didn’t expect was that I would feel like a geriatric sore thumb.
On the very first day of class, one of my professors made a reference to the worldwide panic leading up to the year 2000. The girl sitting behind me muttered, “Geez, I was, like, 9 when that happened. Like, who remembers stuff from that long ago?”
Later, the professor referenced other news events of the ’90s — Lorena Bobbit, Waco, Kurt Cobain, Nancy Kerrigan — only to receive blank looks from the rest of the class.
It was disheartening to realize that, for most of my new classmates, the formative events of my coming of age are only the subject of an episode of VH1’s “I love the ‘90s.”
Of course, because of this generation gap, I know my new classmates are thinking of me as the old lady in the room. Yes, I do carry a lot of hard candy, but that’s no reason for these whippersnappers to look at me like they’re waiting for me to pull out snapshots of my grandkids.
I don’t blame the members of the Facebook generation for not getting my references to “ALF” or “Saved by the Bell,” but I wish we could find some common ground other than, “So, uh, what’d you think of the reading?”
I suppose my only hope is that they’ll think of me as wise, rather than senile, and consider me their old-person mascot instead of looking at me as the geezer invading their turf.
If nothing else, I hope they’ll be patient with my confusion with their strange 21st-century ways and that they won’t mind sitting next to me in class, despite the old-lady smell. Maybe I’ll have to bribe them with a butterscotch hard candy.