Our Future

I'm a kid.
I'm 17 years old.  I don't know where I am going to go to college next year.  I can almost grow a goatee.  Almost.

I lived through the first years of my life confident in (or possibly just ignorant of) the state of my future.  Possibly as a result of growing up in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, I have never been very worried.  In light of recent events however (economic crisis, partisan gridlock, environmental deterioration), I am starting to question how secure my future is.

The Native Americans attempt to live in a way that ensures sustainability of the world for seven generations.   Back when Native Americans held the power, though, America was a completely different place.  In their world, the future was rather controllable; if a tribesman didn't go against his clan, learned how to hunt or gather, and didn't take too much from the land, he could be pretty sure that his children and his children's children would be able to live the same life as he did.

Today however, we are in the midst of the information revolution, and technology is growing at a faster rate than ever.  As technology moves faster than we can keep up with, it feels that we, as individuals, have less control over our future.  In the digital age, we can no longer just pick berries and pass on the same life to our kids.

And yet throughout the U.S.'s history, technology has been growing at extreme rates.  And in spite of this, America has held the ideal that every generation will be better off than the next (at least in the sense that our kids will be better off than ourselves).

In this country, kids grow up learning and believing the American Dream: that we can work hard, make it big and create a better life for our kids. The truth of this ideal (which our country was built on and thrives upon), is now up for question.

My generation grows up in a time where we have only a blurry view of the future.  Will human-driven automobiles be obsolete? Will kids still attend a physical university? Could there be another full scale war?  Will America still be a superpower?

These are the questions that my generation's decisions will answer and yet, as significant as these questions are to me, I feel a little out of the loop.  This blog is an attempt to discover the world my generation will create.  To do this I will look both to the past...
How have societies traditionally treated their children and how does that affect the adults they become?

....and to the present state of kids in our society:
What are the kid's doing today and what world will we expect for us tomorrow?

We are not the generation of our parents.  We are different.  What will things be like when we're in charge?