Sometimes, the universe sends us a message. It’s light and optional or it’s dark and imperative. Recently, I’ve been getting light and optional – but repeatedly, and they started to glitch when I ignored them. I’ve always believed the universe, and its collective consciousness, will set fire to our lawn if we ignore it too long.
I’m a boomer; we’re a generation descended from the last of a certain strain of Americans – but all the world’s generations have made great contributions to the galaxy. Think about the guy who invented the “zero.” It didn’t seem like much at first, but try balancing your checkbook without it.
Ah, the checkbook. That brings me to my topic. Several times over only the past few weeks, editorials on the boomer generation and our outdated habits have found me – those universal shouts. Yesterday, the topper arrived. It was a list of things boomers keep doing that “we should give up” and balancing our checkbook was one of them.
The article pointed out that our finances are automatically tracked for us, available even on our phones, so we shouldn’t bother. Well, apart from it always being best to double check our bank situation and information ourselves, we’re exercising our brain and maintaining our math skills. Boomers always chuckle when we hand a few coins to young cashiers after they ring up the register. Panic. Many can’t do simple math. One day, my late penny brought my change from 99 cents to a round dollar. It was too much for the teenager to handle … sad.
Boomers have also been scoffed at for maintaining landlines, but landlines are critical during a weather crisis or unique solar flares, and on 9/11, cell phones weren’t reliable, but landlines were.
Dress slacks made the “omit” list as did their creases. Seriously? We’ve talked about good grooming gone wrong at Chatterbox before: dressing too far “down”; the whole baseball hats with T-shirts thing; ripped jeans and sneakers everywhere. Talk about passé; let’s abandon these. We need to start wearing some real clothes again, boomers or not.
In an airport a few years ago, a young guy in a three-piece suit went by; men were envious and the women greatly approving. Many Europeans still go to work looking like catalog models, but too many of us work from home computers, unkempt. Abroad, Americans particularly stick out in our lazy attire.
These lists of boomer skills some opine as outdated include resume writing skills, knowing how to use book catalogs, dictionaries and thesauri. Reading paper maps, outdated? What if we’re lost and alone, without a signal? Language skills, table manners, and parents being in charge are all deteriorating, but one listed item particularly peeved me: using cursive.
My research for Chatterbox, Sept. 2, 2010, revealed it’s not merely pretty, an art form, a discipline, and a necessary skill for anyone who will be using, studying, or reading any documents of even 20 years ago. It is, most importantly, a key to developing self-discipline and recognized as imperative and critical to brain development, physical dexterity, and hand/eye co-ordination in children. Like good language and math skills, it’s not something we can ignore, yet some think it’s another thing that’s passé. It seems some people think spelling can be eliminated too, because our phones do that for us; worse, abbreviations overtake it due to texting.
Texting is also, tragically, replacing actual verbal skills. Many young people will actually text the person sitting next to them; we’ve all seen it. We can dismiss this as kids being kids, but this is a dangerous behavior. Communication was one of the first skills humans developed, and it is, indeed, imperative to survival. Are we going backwards? Sadly, we may soon be just grunting at each other again.
The “to go” list goes on. Who comes up with this hogwash? Sure, progress is essential and something still good is overtaken by something even better. Electricity replaced candles and melted the ice man, clean power conquers fossil fuel. These are advancements. However, eliminating basic human skills is neither improvement nor safe. It’s parcel to the dumbing down affect and shouldn’t be validated.
Even old boomers don’t care when we take a bit of bashing but – though change is essential to progress – devaluing, abbreviating, or eliminating basic life skills, or allocating them to fickle energy sources or robotics reliant upon satellites, makes humans dull and jeopardizes survival techniques we may need at a moment’s notice, especially on a world stage.
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