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You can’t know anything, but keep trying

Wed, 11/07/2018 - 12:00 am

Just Passing Through

By the time most of us turned sixteen, we knew “all we needed to know.” Oh, we probably needed a little polishing to get the jobs or the spouses we needed but we knew a lot more than the people we came in contact with. We knew everything we would ever need to know. After all, most of us could drive. We could read and write well enough to fill out an application. We could read a map well enough to find our way home where there would be food and shelter. What else did we need to know?

Modern day sixteenyear-olds are not that much different. They can drive, they can read (maybe not cursive), and they can type. Of course, that’s about the only way they communicate. Although they carry around a phone in their hands, they don’t often talk over those phones. They also can read a map, and if not, they can listen to the voice in their navigation system, which will guide them to the nearest fast food restaurant where there will be food available.

This is where reality brings us and our teenage children and grandchildren to a screeching halt. For everything that we need to know to get us though today is not enough to get us through tomorrow. It’s not just the digital world that keeps us on our feet but nature seems to be moving a lot faster than it did fifty years ago.

We had two huge hurricanes in Texas when I was a kid. Probably more, but I only remember two being on the news. In the last month, we’ve had two horrible hurricanes in the southern United States. Whether it is climate change or the Devil, we’d better be ready for more. No more can we build houses on the beach like we used to. No more can we depend on bridges to be safe. No more can we just go by the old rules — we’ve got to “learn how to adapt to tomorrow.”

We can no longer think that we can use the same communication devices that we used five years ago. Televisions change, phones have become computers in our pockets, and appliances that used to have on/ off switches now require us to talk to them, listen to their commands and adjust to the times or be left behind. If it were not for the intelligent eightyear-old grandchildren that many of us use regularly, we would not be able to get our technology to work. We couldn’t read the text messages from the pharmacy. We wouldn’t be able to check on our bank accounts, doctor’s appointments or find a phone number.

As soon as those eightyear-olds learn to drive, which may be by the time they are ten, they will be out of here, and we’ll find ourselves curled up in a ball at the nursing home trying to figure out how to turn the “radio” on.

No, what one knows at sixteen isn’t enough. It never was. But with technology changing as quickly as it is, all of us, even those sixteen-year-olds, who really do know a lot, are going to have to keep on top of learning. Otherwise, they will find themselves left behind — before they are seventeen.