Peggy Noonan is the best!

I just love reading whatever Peggy Noonan writes! And as soon as I figure out how to link here, I will have to put her articles here...because she is such a great writer!

Read her piece in OpinionJournal.com this morning, about talking to new college graduates and how they all want to go into "communications" to be on TV. I don't know if that's really true, maybe it's just to be expected because TV is so omnipresent in our culture (I should put that in quotes, what exactly is our culture?), and because being on TV or in the "media" looks like fun. And probably you can make good money at it, I don't know.

I don't really remember when I graduated from college (24 years ago!) what everybody wanted to be. Actually, I don't think we wanted to do anything in particular, I don't remember that there was some huge trend at work, everyone wants to go into this or that. It seems as if for the most part you knew you were probably going to go on to grad school, law school or medical school or whatever, because a B.A. didn't necessarily get you much but I don't remember any great seriousness about it.

It must be a sign of getting older, looking at kids 20 years younger (kids!) and seeing them as different than the way I was or my friends were when we were that age.

I was talking to another lawyer about this kind of thing just a couple of days ago. He's 43, I'm 45 and we were talking about the younger lawyers, how they didn't seem as well grounded in the basics, that when you talk to one of them and mention some legal principle that should be more or less universally known and understood by any graduate of a credible law school in America, you get blank stares and the sense that the kid is thinking to himself, "blah, blah, blah...or yeah, I vaguely remember something like that but what does it have to do with anything?" And I laughed and said, Ron, we sound so old! This is probably what all the older lawyers said about us. Maybe these kids aren't really all that different than we are, maybe we're just old. And he said he thought there was a difference, and that one of things that he notices is that the young attorneys his firm interviews, the law students they have clerking during the summer all seem so focused and they have their lives all planned out for decades in advance. They know exactly what they want and how they are going to get it. And we both agreed we weren't like that at their age.

It seems so dull in a way and also completely illusory. How can you have such certainty at 25, to be so sure about what you want and how you're going to get it? And what about all the alternatives you discard because they don't fit the master plan?

One of the main differences I've noticed is an incredible sense of entitlement that seems completely foreign to me, that they have the right to get what they want and that they have the right to expect other people to help them get it. That probably sounds incredibly old and churlish and right in there with "when I was young, I had to walk 5 miles to school and do my homework by candlelight" or probably a more modern version is, "when I was your age, nobody bought me a car, I rode my bike or walked or took the bus until I could afford to buy a car myself", this being something I have said on more than one occasion. But it also happens to be true.

But when I think about the soldiers I've had the privilege of getting to know in the last year, most of whom are deployed overseas, I realize that this so-called younger generation is really special in ways that I don't think we were. They are incredibly dedicated and they do seem to believe in something, more than I think we ever did. So maybe that's the brighter side of how focused and determined they are, that it gets channeled into dedication and commitment and serving "a cause greater than their own self-interest".