Quote:
Originally Posted by
Piobaire 
Eh. As a Gen X, I can tell you I heard how lousy my generation was and the future is bleak, blah, blah blah. I chalked it up to "grumpy old timers." I listened to people that were (or still actually are) flower children talk about the older folks not understanding things in their youth and how they changed the world, blah, blah, blah.
Seems to me, every generation seems to think it's the greatest, full of ideas never thought before, will transform the world, blah, blah, blah and preceeding generations seem to feel this is the worse generation coming up, woe the future, blah, blah, blah.
It's just the human condition.
Waaay back in the late 90s, I attended a high school graduation for the class that followed mine, which, coincidentally, would be the first year of the group this article profiles. At the start of his speech, the valedictorian read a diatribe on how terrible the current generation was, how they'd amount to nothing, and how they were going to ruin the world when they took over. Then he annonced that what he'd just read was written about their parents' generation (roughly the hippies, though mostly at the tail end).
His point was that, as Pio says, every generation seems like a bunch of screw-ups to those that preceded it. However, this has yet to be true; no generation has completely ruined the world. Part of the problem is that these generations are always judged while they're kids, and kids are idiots. Another part of the problem is that people fear change, and each generation brings change.
The reality is that every generation has idiots and geniuses, and bad news gets more press than good news. I mean, would this thread have existed if someone had written an article about how wonderful the younger generation is?
