grown up in an age
permeated by noise of
24-hour news
Adapted from this passage:
You have grown up in an age permeated by the noise of a 24-hour news cycle, by needless political polarization, by devastating gun violence, by the isolating effects of “social” media. You have seen hard-won civil rights rolled back. You have come of age at a time of existential threat — to the planet, to democracy, to the arc of the moral universe itself — and none of it is your fault.
In the Guest Opinion Piece, Against Despair: An Open Letter to Graduates on May 15, 2023 written by Margaret Renkl.
Ms. Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.
She, as is evident in the headline, writing to High School and College Graduates in the Spring of the year 2023.
All she says is true.
These graduates have … grown up in an age permeated …
by the noise of a 24-hour news cycle,
by needless political polarization,
by devastating gun violence,
by the isolating effects of “social” media.
You have seen hard-won civil rights rolled back.
You have come of age at a time of existential threat — to the planet, to democracy, to the arc of the moral universe itself …
… and none of it is their fault.
But, I have to ask, it is within their ability to realize … there was a time, there was a place when life WAS NOT permeated
by the noise of a 24-hour news cycle,
by needless political polarization,
by devastating gun violence,
by the isolating effects of “social” media.
My children never spend a minute imaging a world without a cell phone.
My grand children, digital natives as they are called, grew up in a world that I am fond of pointing out, never existed anywhere.
Never existed not even in the wildest dreams of worlds that Science fiction and non fiction writers ever imagined.
A world where we all carried some of the most power computers ever designed.
Computers that we carry so we can send pictures of ourselves in places that other people aren’t at.
Now they are a part of life.
They replaced what we now call land lines.
Are they missed?
Do these graduates miss these other things.
They are just as gone.
That they are gone is not the graduates fault.
Can it be their fault that they don’t know them well enough to miss them?
No Haiku For You 