Millennials grow up knowing

My son, the science student, lest we forget, was working on a university paper, something to do with ecosystems. Part of this entailed just sitting outside, seeing what was to be seen.

And what did he see, I asked when he came home? “Canis lupus,” said he, “Panthera tigris…” A wolf, a tiger… A raised eyebrow.

The technical term for this is, I believe, “taking the mickey”. And yet I wonder, does he have an inkling of how fortunate he is? He could become a geneticist, a microbiologist, an immunologist.

He is a millennium child: he grew up in a world where he could see a thousand possible futures for himself, a million ways of being.

He grew up with 24-hour television; he grew up on the internet. He grew up knowing. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a window dresser – yes, the person who clothes dummies in shop windows.

I saw a woman doing it in the window of Edgars on Prince’s Avenue once and never in my life had I imagined there existed anything as impossibly glamorous. And that it was a job, that someone did this for a living? Oh, my tender heart overflowed with longing.

How did one ever become such a thing? Who knew? Then a boy in my primary school class told me that his uncle had designed the logo for SABC TV – possibly the original orange, white and blue graphic.

This was when the national broadcaster had but one channel, and Michael de Morgan (probably) read the news. But how could a relative of someone I knew, someone from Benoni no less, have done something as amazing as that? Naturally, I didn’t believe a word of it.

Until then, it had never occurred to me that anybody in real life designed these things, that it was a job.

Having now been informed otherwise, I was stymied. Again, how would one even begin to become that person? But my son knows, or at least knows how to know.

We decry the effects the worldwide web has on kids but, by God, it’s opened up their universe as if it were a pallet of tin cans: some contain worms, sure, but oh, the mind-expanding possibilities that we 20th-century children never had a hope of discovering, nor our parents before us.

Jennie Ridyard

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