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Editorial Column by Logan Hawkes
 Am I the only one to notice that things have changed over the last, oh, say twenty years or so? And I'm not talking about the changes in the stock market or who is sitting in the White House. Those kind of things change (evolve?) all the time.
No - I'm talking about that age old generation gap that has been around at least as long as Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel; the sometimes-not-so-subtle void that lies between youth and, uh, well, maturity.
Of course, it doesn't seem that it was that many years ago that I was on the youth end of this deal looking up, instead of on the mature end looking down. But that, folks, is evolution as well. Get over it. Get used to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it occurs to me that in my youth I remember thinking things like "my generation is really different than any other youthful generation in history," and "my parents didn't have such a huge gap between them and their parents."
Of course my generation cut their teeth on that devil rock-n-roll music; we were drinking sodas or malts at the local drive in or drugstores, we even gave birth to British rock stars, the shitterbug, the mashed potato, and, a few years later, we thought we were doing something positive with flower power and political protests and wearing beads and headbands and burning incense in our bedrooms.
Not that I was really a flower child or hippie. But I knew people that were. Friends would get caught up in music scenes, love ins - in some instances pot parties and war protests. I may not have always agreed with them, but - heck - they were my generation, and in some ways we prided ourselves in thinking we were more progressive than our elders; more progressive than our elders were when they were young.
In other words, most of felt we were about as different from our parents as any generation had ever been. By gosh, we watched man travel to space - even to the moon. We experienced the abolition of race discrimination. We were on the cutting edge of transistorized gadgets, the invention of the computer, and color television could be found in just about every home. Professional sports became the mega-giant passion of the nation, not just a past time, and we celebrated medical breakthroughs like heart transplants and, later, genome research. We progressed from atomic bombs to hydrogen bombs to nuclear missiles. We let our hair grow long (some of us) and liked to go barefoot in the park - and to church (if we thought we could get away with it). Sandals replaced tennis shoes, Led Zeppelin replaced Connie Smith and Dean Martin.
We had to be different than our parents, and more different than any other youthful generation in the history of mankind. Right? Right.
Then I walked out to the beach on South Padre earlier this week and watched and listened to a few of the thousands of college kids who have flocked to South Padre Island this week for Spring Break - and I started eating crow.
I remember thinking, once, that the gap between myself as an adult and my children won't ever be anything like the one that developed between my parents and I. Or I should say my generation and our parent's generation above us. After all, I am more progressive than my father; more open minded. I have lived through some radical youth years myself. I have seen it all! Nothing can astound me.
Whew! Now, I don't want to knock today's music or fashions (lack of?), because I want to remain sensitive to the fact that every generation has their radical side. But I have to tell you, the new generation - or least a good many of them on the beach this week - take the cake: pierced tongues, tattoos in the middle of their backs, rap music with more dirty words than not, piercings on their bellybuttons, tattoos on their toes, more rap, more tattoos in places unnamed, and a lot more piercings, visible or not.
And - excuse me - but were they speaking English? I don't think so.
One young man, who seemed to want something from me, sounded like he was raised in the alley and spoke some variation of alley cat talk, or sewer rat, because I know the words he used couldn't have been English. I did hear some familiar phrases, like "down with that" and "shout out my friends". I just don't know what the missing verbs might have been, and there were participles dangling all over the beach.
To top it off. a cute young coed asked me if I had any beads. I simply turned red.
I'm not actually being critical of our younger generation. Certainly not all of them. Even the radicals to some degree. I don't really care if you pierce your body or wear forty tattoos emblazoned across your shaven head. If you want your lower lip to be a pin cushion of rings and studs and the like, it's okay with me - truly!
But I have to tell you, by comparison, my generation's gap was nothing compared to what I discovered on the beach and in the stores of the island this week. It's no longer a gap or a simple void, it is (in some ways) light years of separation between the new generation and my own.
This is not an attempt to ridicule our youth. Most of them aren't really all that radical, certainly no more than my generation. But --- and that's a big but -- I am so far removed from the culture here on the island that I can't seem to understand what they're saying. Or maybe they are sounding that way because their tongue is full of silver studs. Whatever.
Maybe it's because I just spent a long day on the beach with some very different people. That might all there is to it. Maybe tomorrow I'll go get a tattoo, a piercing and forget how to speak English. Then it won't seem so weird to me. Right? I doubt it.
All in all (all joking aside), I believe in the new generation. Most of them are not lost in the culture crash of the few I described above. But I have to admit the real joke is on me in the end, for I realized the void is not so much because the new generation is so oddly different than mine, it's probably because I am so oddly different than when I was young and full of - well, whatever. The bottom line is, I never thought my father's shoes would fit me so well. LH
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Rio Grande Valley