I am of the last generation that will...
- have grown up and gotten a university education without the Internet;
- have had as a youth ridden one's bicycle on the side walk, against traffic, without a helmet, wherever we want, without ever getting stopped by the police;
- remembered a world without video game consoles, cable TV and call-display telephones ("Who is it?");
- gone trick-or-treating without fear, en masse, the whole neighbourhood participating;
- have had parents and grandparents dislike pop music in favor of classical music or jazz;
- gotten up early Saturday morning to watch cartoons and then in the afternoon and on Monday talking to friends about it, recounting funny parts, acting it out;
- thought it's cool to collect hockey and baseball cards;
- considered terrorism as only news stories about distant places like Ireland and Israel;
- seen defendant lawyers as good but government lawyers as either bad or just bureaucratic (movies, TV and books never made the DA or government dept such as the FBI and CIA look like heroes - Law & Order came along and changed everything);
- traveled on vacation without thinking about flying as an option (planes were too expensive, just for honeymoons and rich people);
- felt the earth is a growing, developing, safe and wonderful place with a bright future (pre-Chernobyl, pre-Valdez oil spill, pre-Challenger explosion, pre-talk of "the environment" as something independent of "the environment of _________" of gorillas, of pandas, of a given local community of people);
- likely gotten a public pension.
