Running with the Egg

For all the fretting that adults do foretelling the demise of human civilization based on the behaviors and interests of children in the present, what good has it done the human race? There's this error in our reasoning that suggests the way a child is today inevitably predicts with straight line accuracy what the child will be like as an adult. If the child is playing video games or preferring their virtual social life to their surroundings, it's seen as if we're destined to have a future where all are strapped in to a virtual existence from which there is no escape and human civilization is once again doomed. Adults may even take pride in the action of stripping a child of their opportunity to engross themselves in the media of the times, thinking that by doing so they are single handedly saving the future of humanity. What self aggrandizing pride is this?

What human beings typically lack is the ability to foresee a future for humanity no different than the present, not better, not worse (as far as these basic grievances are concerned). There's this thinking that if a boy is allowed to play violent video games today, that the society he grows up to participate in will be one that looks the other way on gun crimes (as they had been exposed to so much of it). They do not factor in the humanity of their own children when forecasting the downfall of human decency. They figure "once a mindless drone, always a mindless drone," when their child was never a drone to begin with, but a person capable of reason.

There's a failure to foresee the likeliest of all possible futures, one where the children of today grow up to become adults who will themselves be fretting over something else the children of that time have been exposed to. Despite this trend happening every generation for hundreds of years, adults seem to think this is the generation that finally breaks the cycle and destroys society. Every generation is the end of the line for us, whether it be caused by rock and roll music, video games, rap music, drug use, internet, cell phones, or anything else adults have had trouble understanding.

Let's not fret over what children are involved in today en mass--individual children we can at least talk to--because en mass they simply are not as fragile as adults think they are. In 50 years time, many of the adults alive today will either be dead or elderly, and the world will be a much different place than it is now. The issues and problems of today will either be long resolved, or will cease to be major problems--the preoccupations of today will not last forever. The children will have grown up into similar versions of the adults that came before them, with all the same fretting, perhaps only about different trends.

In 50 years time, the children of today, who have grown up in a totally different world than the previous generation, will inevitably take the trends of today and expand upon them in the future--and no amount of restricting them now is going to stop this from happening. Children change over time, they don't stay children forever. They grow up and become the next wave of adults doing exactly what the previous wave did, only responding to different wind shifts.

Each generation gets its one shot to move the world and society along on the track before handing what it has created off to the next batch of people to do what they please with it. The passage of the earth from one generation to the next is like the old "running with the egg" race, where one player passes an egg balancing on a spoon off to the next player, who then takes it a ways before passing it off to another. The object is to not crack the egg, which for our illustration represents the earth. The thing is, adults do not trust the player they are handing the egg to continue seeing the value of keeping it intact. What happens though is the next generation always does anyways--as they go off to become that society, while the previous generation becomes too old and too dead to really see how their progeny has defied their expectations, time and time again.

So please, be not troubled, because the first one now will later be last, and the last, first. There is no better or worse, no more depravity or social isolation, or whatever our anxiety makes us imagine--there is only progression through time. Children are going to rule the world someday and move it in directions we can only fathom, and they're going to do it regardless of how much fretting is done about how they've been picking their noses today.