Todd Borg

“This country has decided that kids are not the critical trustees of the future but merely an inconvenience to be parked in front of the TV, or a video game, or Facebook, and fed fast food.” Stein gestured toward a group of kids on Virginia Street who seemed unlikely candidates for high school graduation, much less a university education. The boys wore their jeans falling off their butts, cuffs dragging in the dirt. The girls wore skin-tight, low-cut tops that showed lots of cleavage and belly rolls, and low-cut pants that revealed their thongs. Stein huffed. “Now we’re enjoying the benefits of an entire generation whose idea of nutrition is high-fructose corn syrup, whose idea of education is survival reality shows, whose idea of entertainment is gross-out YouTube videos that show people in eating and farting and vomiting contests.” Stein knocked his elbow onto my arm just in case I wasn’t paying attention. “What happened to eating your vegetables and reading books?” he said. He was speeding up, his energy output in direct relationship to his emotional temperature. “What happened to ambition and yearning and intelligent pursuits?” he said. “For thousands of years, people have tried to create an intelligent society, to make us a better species. We celebrated a liberal arts education and studied the classics in literature and art and music and philosophy. Now it’s only taken twenty or thirty years to devolve into a society of militant ignorance. I’ve got kids in my class who can’t write a single literate sentence. They use this new texting language where letters and numerals substitute for entire words. Either they never use capital letters or they only use capital letters. Used to be, Freshman English was just a bit remedial. Now, Freshman English is fourth grade stuff. I had a kid turn in an essay the other day. Every line was like a list. All nouns. I told the kid that a complete sentence had to have a verb in it. He said, ‘What’s a verb?’” Stein was now at a near-trot, his breathing a series of short pants. He turned up some stairs and went into another building. I held the door for him. “These kids in that last class of mine… Will any of them ever go to a library? An art museum? The symphony orchestra? If I mention Archimedes or Pythagoras or Newton or Shakespeare or Mozart or Michelangelo, they have no idea who I’m talking about. Same for Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin. I should be glad they know that Lincoln was a president. But they don’t know what he did or when he did it. They can’t tell me the three branches of our government. They don’t know why any of our past wars were fought. They can’t find Germany or Japan or Korea or Vietnam or Iraq on a map.”
― Todd Borg, Tahoe Hijack