By Dave Kinnamon, Commentary
January 25, 2008 12:22 am
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The only thing constant is change.
That old adage conveys, in a very simple way, the dominant physical law that everything changes over time. It’s an immutable truth of the universe.
Over the course of one day, sometimes even over a period of seconds, the sky changes from clear to cloudy or from cloudy to clear. On any given day, the blueness of the sky will appear different at different times or compared to the day before. The blueness of the sky will appear a different blue depending on where in the world the beholder is observing the sky. Every human eyeball perceives the sky’s blue a little differently, a biology teacher once told me.
People change over time in physical, mental and emotional ways. Ideas, laws, beliefs, values and systems all change over time. In our world, nothing ever remains exactly the same. Now, I am speaking of worldly things here, not heavenly.
If you want to amuse yourself sometime, perhaps while waiting in your dentist’s waiting room, consider how your views on morality, people, work and politics have changed the past 10, 20, 30 or more years. It’s an amusing exercise.
We history lovers are very pre-occupied with the past; therefore, analyzing change over time in some ways comes second nature to us.
I was talking with a fellow last weekend who shared some insights about the Millennial Generation — those Americans born from 1980-2000. The fellow is himself a Millennial. I am a “Gen-X”er (a label I’ve always considered unimaginative and simplistic, even idiotic). My parents are Baby Boomers. This fellow told me about a study he had read which discussed recent intensive research about the unique qualities of Millennials and how they compare against Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers.
The fellow said some experts predict there will be tension in the U.S. economy as the Boomers begin retiring in the tens and hundreds of thousands. Many of their jobs will be filled by Millennials. According to the study — which like all massive studies only applies in general terms — Millennials are more capable, brighter and more optimistic than either of the two generations that preceded them. The Millennials, as the Internet generation, also are more tech-savvy. They have not personally adopted some of the workplace core values of the Old School: The good of the employer comes before my own; never miss work; always stick with a job for at least “x” number of years, etc.
For example, my mom’s long-time companion, a Baby Boomer, has invested his whole working adult life in selling insurance for one big insurance company. He refers to the Millennials in his office as “The Young Guns.” The Young Guns make more and bigger insurance sales with less effort, he laments. The Young Guns frustrate my mom’s companion because, he says, they take “stress days” off in the middle of the week. His Old School point of view is unaccepting of missing work for any reason other than sickness, an emergency or scheduled time off.
Some things appear never to change, like McDonald’s for instance. McDonald’s is as much a symbol of the United States as the bald eagle or Paris Hilton. McDonald’s offered the Big Mac and Happy Meals 35 years ago when I was a kid. Today I buy Big Macs for myself and Happy Meals for my 5-year-old son. The basic architectural structure of McDonald’s restaurants is roughly the same as when I was kid. But ... who’d of ever matched up DVD rentals and McDonald’s restaurants? At every McDonald’s restaurant in the U.S., it seems, one can see a car pull up and stop, not necessarily for the goodness of the drive-through, so the driver can get out of their car to rent a DVD from a DVD-renting vending machine, with the red and yellow McDonald’s theme colors splashed over the machine.
To me, renting a DVD from a vending machine at a fast-food restaurant is on par with buying a hearing aid from a movie house concessionaire. It’s all good. It’s yet more healthy evidence of the wonderful natural mechanisms of free market capitalism at work.
Another thing that seems to have stayed the same over the decades but hasn’t really stayed the same is Americans’ preoccupation with Washington, D.C., personalities. I was watching C-SPAN the other day as some little-known government bureaucrat from the Department of Defense was interviewed by a Senate panel. There were at least 30 well-meaning, earnest news photographers all crouched down on their haunches and buttocks with huge zoom lenses that would give an atomic telescope an inferiority complex.
The photographers were crouched down directly in front of the Senate dais, and they were all taking pictures of just this one federal bureaucrat I had never seen nor heard of. (I can’t even specifically recall what the gentleman looked like.) How many different pictures can a photographer take of one guy sitting at a table? How many inventive angles can a photographer use on a set-up like that? How newsworthy and interesting is a zoom shot of some uptight guy’s face as he answers loaded questions from self-serving politicians? Are the photographers trying to capture even the craters on the subject’s face? Perhaps there are 30-plus news photographers at Senate hearings taking close-up pictures of people’s faces on the off chance the subject will break down and sob or become insanely angry and then make a scene.
I think I would rather rent a DVD at McDonald’s than watch C-SPAN anyway.
Kinnamon is online/special projects editor of the News & Eagle. He may be reached at davidk@enidnews.com.
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Dave Kinnamon