One thing I noticed was, there are a lot of eagles along the middle reaches of the Missouri River. Bald eagles in the trees, eagles soaring overhead, eagles huddling over carrion on the road.
The other thing I noticed was, it’s good to be around young people, I mean specifically young people outside your immediate circle, as it instills hope. Because Lord knows, the cohort of people we refer to as Gen Z has been much disparaged by their elders, particularly Boomers. Employers, notably, have critiqued Zoomers as entitled, cynical, noncommittal, and addicted to their smartphones.
I confess, Gen Z has driven me to distraction at times. I mean, Boomers teaching Zoomers, we confront daily the well-established decline in literacy in America and the accompanying deterioration of executive function—those two things are directly related. But it's more the matters of attitude, the same things employers rail about.
The past couple of years, though, I have noticed an attitudinal shift, not complete, but noticeable. My instructional assignment puts me in continual contact with young people intending to become teachers, and as we get acquainted, I always ask them, Why do you want to teach?
Their answers now are interesting. They say it seems to them that by going into teaching, they will immediately become part of a community where they might be able to find their place and do some good. Wow, that’s different.
Then, too, I travel with students on learning expeditions, and thereby discover other endearing qualities. One example: they love all things tangible and tactile. Put them in touch with interesting objects—say, handling artifacts in a local history museum—and they light up.
I spent last weekend in the Missouri River valley of eastern Nebraska, coming on invitation of the History faculty at Peru State College. Specifically, to interact with their students. Nice kids, who one day we can trust to teach our grandkids. A hopeful interaction. Before coming home, I also gave a lecture at the Kregel Windmill Factory Museum, a wonderful establishment in Nebraska City. There, my talk, somewhat to my own surprise, took me into the very generational terrain I am talking about. I spent some time discussing a famous essay by Willa Cather from 1923 entitled, “Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle.”
Cather, of course, extolls the virtues of the pioneers, much as, I realize, Boomers laud the heroism of the Greatest Generation. What is striking about her remarks is the credit she gives to the ethnic immigrants who populated the landscape in which she grew up on the Great Plains. She considers the immigrants to be settlement stock distinctly superior to the Anglo-Americans.
Then, Cather begins to sound a lot like Boomers today, raking the younger generation for its materialism, frivolity, its lack of seriousness. And yet, she has vision, and she writes, “I have always the hope that something went into the ground with those pioneers that will one day come out again. Something that will come out not only in sturdy traits and character, but in elasticity of mind, in an honest attitude toward the realities of life, in certain qualities of feeling and imagination.”
Am I being a pollyanna? Blame it on Cather.
