Where Are the Snowdens of Yesterday?

Did you see the story in the newspapers about the young woman who is "Hannah Montana" on TV writing her autobiography? As I understand it, she's 15 years old. I don't imagine she has many memories of anything before her third birthday so how large a memoir should we breathlessly expect? Both sides of a 3 by 5 card? Should we camp out at Borders now in case they try to sneak it onto the shelves while we're not watching? Every generation throws a hero up the pop chart, and because I'm old, I'm allowed to offer the observation that in recent years, it's been quantity if not quality. And in the interests of full disclosure if it does turn out to be quality, my autobiography wouldn't fill one side of a small yellow stickie.

So how much news is noise, how much news is actually 'new' and how do you filter the real from the surreal and NOT surrender to the temptation to just let it wash over you? For a generation or more, the word 'discrimination' has had a bad reputation for a very good reason, but each of us discriminates dozens if not hundreds of times every day. How you decide what you wear is a matter of decision making (not for me; I ask my wife who actually has me so well-trained I don't have to ask, she just puts the stuff out. I am the oldest of her three children (I only have two), and much older than our son, if you follow my drift). We make decisions on what we eat and what we drive and so on, so it stands to reason we sort out our sources of information in terms of what we feel most comfortable in processing and how we apply it to our lives.

Some of us (mostly folks my age and about a decade younger) are TV news folks, be it CNN, Fox MSNBC, WWE (okay three out of four) while for those my children's age, it's not even 'the Internet' it's email and text messaging.....that's how our progeny get the news, so roll over Beethoven. I realized not that long ago my children do not wear watches, unless, they're visiting their aging parents, because they now know their decrepit Dad gets freaked out when he notices they check the time by looking at their cell phones. It never occurred to me there were clocks/watches built into these things, though, of course, there are. What isn't these days?

I'm pretty sure in the next struggle between good and the forces of evil, if we can persuade the Evil-Doers to thumb wrestle, our kids will save the world because, thanks to texting, they have the strongest thumbs since the Roman Emperors were serving the Christians to the lions back in the Coliseum. I have a cell phone that allows me to take pictures, record videos and browse the Web. I am tres cool, nichts wahr? But if I wanted to do most of this stuff, I'd have to seek out someone my children's age, tell them what I was trying to do and they would have to do it for me as I have no ability to do more than get the phone part of the cell phone to work (and only if I know the number-yes, it has a phone book and a voice dial and no I don't know how to make any of that work).

That I take this device with me everywhere is just another part of the mosaic of befuddlement I have created as a defense against most of what the world hath wrought. But it's good to know, I guess, that if I saw Hannah Montana scribbling away on a 3 by 5 card, I could, in theory, shoot video of her and post it to YouTube, assuming I had someone point her out to me. I would never confuse her with Big Footed Bertha, Yossarian, so don't go there. Ever.
-bill kenny