From an email I received:
A very self-important college freshman attending a recent football game took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation.
“You grew up in a different world, actually an almost primitive one,” the student said, loud enough for many of those nearby to hear. “The young eople of today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man alking on the moon, our spaceships have visited Mars. We have nuclear energy, electric and hydrogen cars, computers with light-speed processing and,” pausing to take another drink of beer.
The senior took advantage of the break in the student’s litany and said, “You’re right, son. We didn’t have those things when we were young……..so we invented them. Now, you arrogant little punks, what are you doing for the next generation?”
The applause was resounding.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
And in the meantime, the parent of the kid (and daughter of the senior citizen) was off in the bathroom taking her prozac and wondering when the next sale at Nordstrom’s was going to take place.
As a college student, I have to say that I strongly disagree with the student in this story.
Virginia’s blogosphere is a prime example of why the guy was simply wrong. Throughout the Virginia, we have bloggers ranging in age from their teens to well into their 60’s and 70’s (and there may be some who are older but I simply don’t know their age). And there are many cases in which I didn’t even know a blogger’s age until I met them in person.
Wow, that’s amazing! People are still telling the story Ronald Reagan told in the 60s.
“It was the Vietnam era, and I forget what it was that had motivated and inspired the protesters on this particular day, but they stormed the capital. They stormed Reagan’s office in Sacramento, or he might have been in Berkeley somewhere. They demanded to see him and they weren’t going to surrender what they had taken over till he saw them and they demanded. They were just vicious as they could be. They were shouting, and the press was all there. Reagan finally relented, and he let a group of these student leaders come into his office, and one of the student leaders just started pointing a finger at him, “You’re an old fogy. You can’t tell us how to live. You can’t tell us about our future. You can’t tell us what’s going to happen to us, because you’re too old. You don’t have any of the things. You didn’t have any of the things that we’ve got now. You didn’t know what phones were like. You didn’t know what automobile travel was. You didn’t know what travel by air. You didn’t know what instant communications are.”
“This is the 60s and they started listing all of these things that he was supposedly unable to reality to them about, and who was he to sit here and make policy for them. So he listened patiently as they shouted and screamed at him, and when they were finished, he looked at ’em, he said, “Well, you’re right. We didn’t have any of those things. We had to invent them for you.” Bzzzzzt! Dead silence. “
And, of course, it’s likely as true now as it was then 🙂