There are, generally, three groups of people who are more interested in the past than they are the future: Historians, memoirists and bores.
I don’t belong to either of the first two groups and I make an effort to avoid the last one. I admit that the gravitational pull of that group grows stronger as I grow older, though.
That’s probably true for most people. Our inner lives include a battle between the past and the future and even a child can wax nostalgic. When I was in third grade, I remembered with wistful fondness the carefree days of being a 5-year-old who never had homework.
But until the moment when we are no longer visitors to the past but permanent residents of it, we are not old – regardless of what it says on our birth certificates – or, worse yet, bores.
That’s what I was surprised by Thom Caraccio’s latest column because it so greatly departed from previous columns, which I would describe as being memoirs in nature. Thom’s stories of the people, places and events of growing up in Columbus are relatable to our shared generation.
But his latest column (“The United States of me, me, me,”) was an out-of-the-blue assault on young Millennials and Gen Z.
He described them as self-absorbed show-offs. He wrote that these young folks have accomplished nothing and likely would never accomplish anything. Well thanks a lot, Norman Vincent Squeal.
His primary evidence of this are bad tattoos, obscure college majors, student loan forgiveness and, particularly troubling, the current practice among the young of twerking and taking duck-lip selfies.
He wrote that they were signs of a “real pandemic” not like COVID, which, he wrote, most everyone recovers from (except for the one million Americans who, you know, actually died from it). I haven’t seen the data on duck-lip-related deaths, so he could be right for all I know.
What is certain is that Thom is clearly frustrated, almost as if to say, “Why can’t kids today streak, hitch-hike, smoke dope from bongs and sleep on giant plastic bags filled with water from a garden hose like normal people?”
Parents have been asking that question since the Silent Generation, which probably thought it.
My folks observed the clothes I wore, the music I listened to and the pointless amusements I pursued as sure signs that I wasn’t going to amount to anything.
Well, OK. So my folks were half-right. I never did amount to anything, but that had more to do with priorities than preferences.
I sort of feel bad for where Thom appears to be headed if this column is an indicator.
It is a paradox that the longer you are in the world, the less you seem to understand it.
At some point popular culture begins to play on a frequency you can no longer detect and if you aren’t careful, you can find yourself retreating from it, resenting it and, yes, ridiculing it. If you think duck lips are silly, look at your hairstyle in your yearbooks from the 1970s, then get back to me.
No, it’s not being unable to understand the world that makes someone old. It’s having no desire to understand it that dooms a person to relic status.
The tell-tale signs of aging often include losing your hearing, losing your eyesight, losing your hair, losing your balance, losing your mobility. You can’t do much about those things.
But there is another tell-tale sign of aging: Losing your curiosity. That’s something you can do something about.
There are men and women I know who are well into their 80s who live happily and fearlessly in the present. They are intelligent, thoughtful, interesting people who are fascinated by the new things they encounter and are eager to understand them and, heck, maybe even give ‘em a try. When you talk to them, it’s almost always about some new discovery, idea or adventure.
Then, there are those who only seem to want to talk about the 1969 high school prom, how much better things were in the olden days or how this young generation is going to hell in a handbasket.
You know, bores.
Who would you rather spend time with?
I hope Thom’s last column was just a momentary side trip into Cranky Old Mans-ville.
There’s nothing wrong with him that a duck-lip selfie wouldn’t cure.
So lighten up, Thom.
The kids are alright.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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