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Edgar H. Thompson

Thompson is a professor of education at Emory & Henry College.

If I had a dollar for every time I listened to The Who's "Pinball Wizard" when I was in college, I would be worth a fortune.

Little did I know that song would give me insight into how people the same age that I was then now see the world.

Folks in their 20s are like pinballs in a pinball machine.

The difference is that their machine is flat, has no beginning or ending, and has no hole of return in which to fall.

They live in their own little sub-world, bounce off each other, collide with ideas, careen from experience to experience, and keep on moving.

Although happy, for the most part they lack focus, direction and, many times, feelings.

They assume life will be as it has been -- good. They assume they will have to work, but they are not sure what that means.

They assume they will get married and have children, regardless of their sexual preference, and that they will find true love that will last forever.

They ignore the possibility of misfortune and keep bouncing off each other, moving, just moving nowhere in particular.

I have worked with and observed this generation for many years. I train teachers, many of whom fit the profile I have just described.

I find that when the students in their early 20s cannot do the work in front of them as well as they think they can, they become frustrated, as students always have.

However, instead of searching for a solution to the problem, they tend to stall and do nothing. It is almost as if they expect magic to intervene, making everything work out. Of course, magic seldom happens.

But is this paralysis in the face of challenge much different from what it used to be in the 1960s? The answer is "yes and no."

People in my generation expected things to come our way, perhaps too optimistically.

But we expected to work for whatever we received if it really counted. Students now seem to expect it "just because."

Entitlement, when not fulfilled, leads to confusion about what to do next, which often involves what in the movie "Animal House" would have led to a necessary dodge, a road trip or an escape into delusion until a solution to the problem was revealed or the reality could finally be accepted and confronted.

When confronted with a problem, the inclination among young people often is to allow time to pass rather than to work immediately to find a solution.

It is easy to criticize the younger generation for its sense of entitlement, but to do that is to forget how slowly times have changed and how culpable we are as parents and adults in the perpetuation of this phenomenon.

In fact, as a culture, we all now seem to expect things to come our way.

Thus, when the tragedies of the kind of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit us, when the level of insurgency in Iraq seems to get worse not better, when our environment is threatened, and when our way of life is undermined by the demands for raw materials from other parts of the world, we don't know what to do. We give up.

As adults, instead of joining picket lines and demonstrations as we might have done in the 1960s, we assume no one is listening, we don't vote, and we spend most of our time complaining with our peers about how nothing of substance is happening on the political front.

We refuse to think beyond the soundbites and the talking points, and we blame politicians because we haven't held them accountable.

Young folks today, if anything, are more loving than peers from my generation, and they bond together as friends more quickly and significantly than I think people of my generation did.

People in their 20s today seem happier, even if they are not as engaged as us older folks would like them to be. Maybe older folks have something to learn from them.

Maybe life really is a game of pinball and the drop offs that really do exist are out of our control.

Or perhaps there is more that all of us can and should do -- to protect our environment, to improve our communities and to reach out to one another.

However, if we're not prepared to be more active and take responsibility for the failures of our government and our culture, then perhaps we should follow Herbie Hancock, more of my generation, who decreed advice that our children have learned, if not from our example then on their own:

"Be happy!"