Daughter Annie has been chronicling her graduation experience on her blog. She graduated from Laramie County Community College on May 14 and will head to UW in Laramie in mid-June. She intends to be an English major. I have done my best to change her mind. "How about something useful, like pre-med or accounting?" or "Have you thought about a career as plumber?"
Nevertheless, she persisted. She is a chip off the old block, offspring of an English major. I posted about the graduation here. She speaks openly about her long haul and her not always pleasant experiences along the way. I admire her honesty as I tend to skip deep feelings and fall back on humor to lighten life's heartbreaks. A generational difference, I guess. I am a first-wave Boomer and Annie is a second-wave Millennial. We share interests in reading, writing, classic rock, and movies. But we look at life through different lenses.
She knows more about my generation than I do hers. When I look at her generation, I see bright people looking on in disbelief at the chaos we older generations have wrought. I may have looked this same way in 1969 when the best and brightest wanted to kill me and millions of others. Annie has many artistic tattoos and introduces me to new music by changing the dial on my car radio. In reality, she doesn't need my car radio because she has her own car and car radio and myriad tech devices that pull in music, videos, and possibly signals from Tralfamadore.
See how much fun you can have with generational conflict?
When I first signed on with Blogger in 2001, I admired the fresh voices, honest as the day is long. Not one of the bloggers I followed in those early days would use "honest as the day is long" (air quotes) which is, as you know, "as old as the hills." They were much more creative. In 2006, I gravitated to lefty political blogs which led to my selection as Wyoming's official embedded blogger at the 2008 Democratic Party National Convention in Denver where, at 57, I may have been the oldest practitioner at Blogger HQ outside the Pepsi Center. I received a scholarship to Netroots Nation 2011 in Minneapolis. I traveled in fall of 2011 with fellow nogoodniks to present a panel on progressive blogging at the University of South Dakota. Those were heady days. We were the future. I tied in with regional lefty bloggers and started posting and reposting on Daily Kos. Social media was in its infancy but pretty soon grew into the monster we know today.
I started a blog for my workplace and a year later was called into the director's office to ask why I started a blog without permission. I said, gee, all the kids were doing it and he agreed that I should stop doing it immediately. At career's end, I was lord of our Wordpress blog and social media manager. My Millennial kids thought this was hilarious and I tended to agree.
So here we are in 2022. Blogs did not birth a thoughtful, more progressive, America.
I blame myself.
Read part two of Annie's "How I got here: my time at LCCC.
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