My friend over at Yarns & Yarns is Just Muttering about me again.
“Devradowrite attributes the problem to journalists’ inexperience and youth. I don’t think that’s it, unless one assumes all inexperienced and/or young people are irresponsible and lazy because I think irresponsibility and laziness are the core problems.”
Sorry to say that my cynicism runs much deeper than that. I don’t think that the majority of today’s youth are lazy, not at all. They work very hard at what they deem to be important. Nor would I describe them as irresponsible; they follow through on their agendas. What I do question are their values (or lack of) and their self-centeredness, traits that our society has encouraged down the wrong path.
With each passing year it seems that the degree to which the marketplace panders to youth grows exponentially; no wonder they think the world revolves around them. I do remember feeling in my twenties that I knew it all, so to some degree maybe nothing is new, but this is different. Feeling cocky or sure of myself was still a long way from disrespecting my elders, even if our slogan was “never trust anyone over thirty.” Dismissing or disregarding everything outside your own world view is disrespectful.
And what lessons do we teach when we hire packagers to help us with our applications and resumes, and when plagiarism and lies become the surefire way to increase your revenues.
A recent article in New York Magazine makes my point, so I am not alone with these thoughts. In Generation Xerox — Youth may not be an excuse for plagiarism. But it is an explanation. Kurt Andersen writes about Kaavya Viswanathan, “author” of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life:
She is a flagrant example of the hard-charging freaks that our culture grooms and prods so many of its best and brightest children to become, a case study in one sociopathology of the adolescent overclass….
…she had already come to understand that her success so far was not just a matter of talent and discipline but of buying the right connections, cutting deals for behind-the-scenes assistance, cunning. She was hooked up with her packager, Alloy Entertainment, by the agency William Morris (which also represents me), and hooked up with William Morris by her college-application consultant, Katherine Cohen.
Cohen may be worth the $33,000 she charges for her “platinum package.†But there’s something fundamentally untoward about the cynical lessons that such a makeover process teaches the kids who go through it—especially when it seems to work.
I am afraid that as a society we are sowing a lot of bad seeds.