When I was your age

The thing about age is this: If you are 40, you have been 20. If you are 20, you have never been 40. (Substitute any number that works for you when comparing you to your parents, teachers, elected officials, policemen, or anyone else you want to hate 'cause they tell you what to do.)

The fact remains: No matter how much it pains you to admit it, those who are older and who share your general intelligence level and who live in approximately the same world you do (such as America), will know pretty much what's going on in your mind. They are, for the most part, actually trying to help you benefit from what they've learned. You don't give a shit now, but when you turn into them you may refer back to this node for an I told you so moment.

We did'nt have any of those Septempium whatchamacallits, We had computers that filled two whole rooms! And when we wanted to do somting with em, we had to fill out little punch cards and give them specially bred mutants in white coats who would look real shifty at you before they tak'em from you. Then we had to wait 5 whole years for our programs to be validated, and when we got'em back, there were 5 billion errors in them, and so we had to go back to the classroom that was 12 miles from the computer building (we could'nt afford shoes then, so we wore old budweiser cases) and we had to trace by hand on the chalk board (we had to mine the chalk from a quarry back then), all 50 thousand lines of code!...
The following may have been a typical rambling from a senile retired computer programmer 70 years from now (or today)

When was the last time parents lived in the same world as their kids? While it may happen rarely, it is definitely not regular.

For instance, I am a high school senior. I have had a PC since I was in 6th grade. I program, talk to my friends (both RL and Internet only) over email, have premarital sex, deal with issues like homosexuality, AIDs, the shadow of Columbine, and watch DVDs. My parents got a TV around 6th grade. They fixed cars or typed, felt telephones were too impersonal, dealt with the Vietnam War, and flower power. VCRs weren't around yet.

And yet they think they went through the same experience I did. Add to that the fact they were a jock and a prep and you better believe they had a different experience than I.

It is called the Generation Gap and its huge. The Roaring 20s generation had many differences with the WWII generation. The WWII generation didn't get the Baby Boomers. They don't get Generation X and the current generation. In the last 3 generations, TV, computers, CDs, the Internet, the pill, cell phones, pagers, rock n roll, punk, rap, techno, the electric guitar, civil rights for blacks, spaceships, and nuclear bombs, were invented. Each has changed how we look at life. And still parents believe they went through the same things as their kids.

My parents are bright. My father was a jock, but at Boston Latin (a magnet school in Boston), and both went to college. Yet, they have little to no chance of understanding what my life is like outside our home. And this is how it works. Add to this that many parents don't want to understand, but only wish to direct their children into the way they want them to grow up, and they use when I was your age to try to direct their kids towards their desired traits and all it shows is the parent's cluelessness.

Sorry for the rantlike writeup.