Every generation of young adults faces challenges baffling to their parents, and this year’s school and college graduates are not exempt from this rule.
The road ahead for these young men and women is particularly foggy in an emerging society that faces changes brought on by the Internet, legalization of cannabis, the politics of climate change, the end of the Oil Age, the transformation of agriculture into Smart Farming, the transformation of democracy and the marginalization of religious faith.
The graduates from Mountain View County’s high schools and Olds College this year have given the X generation a name. They belong to the social media generation, the first to have spent their formative years in the Virtual Age.
The legalization of pot is a badly-executed echo of boomers and millennials, which, in due course, will be adjusted and normalized by the social media generation.
The search for climate-friendly alternative energy will see the advent of the Hydrogen Age.
In one of my first interviews as an oil journalist in 1976, Amed Zaki Yamani, then the chairman of OPEC and Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, said, “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones and the Oil Age will end before we run out of oil.”
In 2018, the Oil Age is ending.
Olds College is on the cutting edge of a new era of farming.
The college launched its Smart Farm on June 27, so we are present at the creation.
The future of democracy in the years of Trudeau and Trump is being worked out in the atmosphere of an auction, so take a deep breath.
It’s not about left or right, Justin or Andrew, Jason or Rachel.
It’s about the systemic failure of elective politics in North America.
And it will fall into the hands of the social media generation to fix things.
Finally, the social media generation will decide whether religious faith belongs in the mainstream or will continue its unwilling pilgrimage to exile in the underground.
Mathematician, philosopher and champion of faith in human life, Alfred North Whitehead wrote that, “Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.”
Christianity is caught between its ancient Scriptures, now 2,000 to 6,000 years old, and the realities of change. It has always modernized slowly.
The Protestant Reformation addressed centuries of abuse by the Catholic hierarchy.
The church has encountered and resisted the Dark Ages, the European incursion of Islam, the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the wars of the 20th century and the Space Age.
Now it is up to the social media generation to decide the place of the church in the Virtual Age.
Whitehead also wrote: “the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.”
The social media generation that graduated in June has the opportunity to remake civilization.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
