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Our next generation: Are things getting better or worse?

Remember how your Mom always warned you not to write, say, or maybe even think, something you didn't want broadcast to the whole world? Well, that day has come, gone, and now has t-shirts.

Livejournal, MySpace, and Facebook. The Holy Trinity of wasting time, getting stalked and losing your job because of some inappropriate slur or personal habit. Yet, these sites keep exploding with members, especially young people. I myself am victim to a membership of all three, but as I've gotten older, I shy away from them.

Perhaps it's because I like my privacy and don't find cyber-stalkers all that flattering, but maybe I'm just plain tired of knowing so much about everybody. The more I know, the less I care to know. Idiots band together with other idiots and form groups of idiots! The small little bubble most people constrain themselves to is ever so clear with these mediums. Facebook reveals a lot about a person's beliefs and narrow-mindedness, which there seems to be no lacking of at any given moment.

A random search of Facebook revealed the following group, "Anti-Hilary Clinton for President 08: Re-defeat Communism" with 61, 865 members. Related groups included: Affirmative action is racism, Stay in Iraq until the job is done, Abortion is murder, All justices on the supreme court should be Southern Baptist, and If you don't like our country then you can get out.

Not surprisingly, many of these groups came from stereotypical "dumb" areas, like Kentucky, and were mostly high school students. One young man posted:
I'm a high school grad gettin ready to join the marines in the fall and It freakin annoy's me when people come to this country because it's the only place where they can meet with their friends and they don't have to worry about being raided by the Gov. and then they come here illegally brake our laws then have the gaul to criticize our troops our president and our people. My prayers our with the troops fighting for our freedom.

You know, out of all the postings I browsed, what struck me more than anything is how I continue to be very disappointed with our public education system in the U.S. Mainly because so many young people graduate high school not yet fully grasping what a homophone is, or where to place puntction's in sentence's.

Words that sound the same, yet are spelled differently. Groups that sound the same, yet have different names. Huh, funny how the two are so connected. I think I left my Facebook years behind when I began realizing how screwed up everything is. When I realized people would rather personally confront one another via computer or join an online group in place of volunteering for the cause, I began my decent into the blog world; where the only thing that matter's is me an my's bubble.

Learn more about this author, C. Gentle.
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