Soft Generation?

I am not yet 40, but I really think I am officially old. I don't feel old. I don't look (too) old, save for a few grey hairs creeping in. And I definitely don't want to act old too often (as my wife can attest). But, I am afraid that I am inescapably old due to the fact that I keep uttering one of the the Old People Pledges of Allegiance: "Kids today are soft." "They have no idea how good they have it." And the classic, "When I was their age [insert rambling discourse on how difficult your life was in the mid '80s compared to how easy kids have it today]..." You can't claim to be young and still insist on carrying on a conversation that begins with an Old People Pledge. If you are volleying a complaint about a generation below you, you are officially old.

Now, there are varying degrees of olditude, so the mere fact that you are acknowledging that you are old doesn't put you immediately into God's Waiting Room, but it does make you old. Never once in my 20s did I utter an Old People Pledge, because I was too busy having fun and starting a career to be concerned with the teenagers coming up behind me. And in my young to mid thirties, I was frankly too sleep deprived from starting a family to care what was going on in the generations below me. No, it wasn't until my late thirties that I started to even notice the generations below me, and a few more years after that to utter an Old People Pledge. But now that I'm here, well, you have to jump in with both feet, right? So I'll go ahead and say it: I can't freaking believe that many colleges are not requiring SAT scores of their applicants. Are you kidding me?? One of the most nerve-racking, nausea-inducing, your-whole-future-may-hang-in-the-balance-if-you-blow-this-test moments of my youth will now be a tape deck, or VCR to these kids - something they know existed a while ago, but they can't quite remember why. I mean, when I was there age (Pledge!) we spent the better part of two years taking the PSATs, preparation courses, pre-tests, and then took the SATs, usually multiple times. It was a right of passage to completely bomb one of the exams to such an extent that you convinced yourself you'd never get into college and you'd be digging ditches for the rest of your life. And the Rolodex of excuses you created for discussions with your friends, parents, teachers, and college admission directors was a work of art that you carefully honed and edited, and memorized: "Well, I really concentrated on Verbal this time, so my Math should really come up big time when I take it again." Or, "I'm not very good at standardized tests." Or, "I was absolutely killing it, and I ran out of time." And then there were the horror stories of the kid that so and so knew who screwed up the answer key and all of his answers were off by one line. Terrifying for a 17 year old with college ambitions. And so what if it was biased and didn't really accurately test how smart you were! that's not the point! the point is, it was a rite of passage that everyone had to go through and it either broke you or made you stronger. And now? Nada.

It is bad enough that there is no dodge ball in gym class anymore, no jungle gyms on the playground, and every organized sport up until junior high ends in a freaking tie, so none of the kids will ever have to lose at anything (God forbid!), now we'll soon have an entire generation who doesn't know the pressure of the SATs. Now wonder we are getting our butts kicked by economies all over the world! Plus, where else except an SAT prep course will you learn cool words that sound great, but you can never pull off in normal conversation? Words like ennui (melancholy), eschewed (abstained), and cadre (basic unit). If the next generation is happy at another friend's misfortune, they will never know they are experiencing schadenfreude, and a great story-teller will be just that, he will not be a raconteur. Yes, the SAT will slide off into history like so much detritus. And me? Well, I'll be on a train that leaves New York at 3:00pm traveling 50 m.p.h., arriving in Chicago at a time no teenager will be able to figure out.