If You Give a Kid a Smartphone...

...they may begin to wonder about the future.

If that kid also works in a fruit stand, they may also see the rising price of food as elderly customers tremble over how little change they recieve. They may also see a grandmother or grandfather shake their heads sadly and walk away without anything.

The kid has a Smartphone, a digital device that can pretty much do everything and anything. She grew up with poor parents who knew how to save in such a way that they had never experienced want. These elderly customers the kid serves were once kids. They were children during the 1920's Great Depression.

Durring the depression there was all sorts of propaganda about saving, buying bonds for military equipment, and other things. Knee length dresses came into fashion largely due to the lack and expense of material available. Families rationed sugar just so they'd have enough to make a cake on someone's birthday. Gas was a luxery that was horded and was to be used only when absolutely necessary.

The saying, "Use it up, wear it out, make due or do without," was heard in every home.

Now the kid wonders about all this talk on Syria, the rising food and gas prices, the demonizing of people nobody really knows and then she realizes that the people who live today probably couldn't do what the people did in the 1920's.

The 1800's was full of cultural change and the settling of the West. The kids who grew up in the 1920's were the grandkids of pioneers, immagrants, and labor's who possessed only what they needed or less. They couldn't stop at a store in the next twenty minutes. If they were lucky and didn't get lost there were trading posts every so many weeks with limited supplies that the families would have to purchase with the few possessions they had. There was nothing and no one to help the pioneers but themselves. All they possessed they carried in wagons with teams, handcarts, or if they were really poor, on their backs. Many immigrants who crossed the ocean had even less. Some came with only a few dollars and a single outfit of clothes.

These were the people who raised the parents of the children of 1920. They were taught what bare minimum was needed to survive, how to be self reliant, and how to care for and help their neighbors who struggled next to them with kindness and respect.

The kid with the Smartphone remembers a Grandmother who tried to feed her a piece of old fruit that the child knew her mother would have never let survive in their own kitchen, but the Grandmother knew it still had nutrients. It still had what was necessary to survive.

The majority of the children of 2013 do have parents who are money savy and teach proper respect. These parents grew up in a generation that always had a steady rise in cost. In the 90's gas cost less than a dollar per gallon. Today it costs nearly four dollars. These parent have to budget month by month if not day by day to keep up with price changes in basic goods and they do know how to get by.

Their kids do not. They won't understand until they join the work force and realize just how much life costs.

The 1800's were a long time ago.

Kids think that basic needs include two-ply toliet paper, Gatorade, Neutrogena shampoo, heating and air conditioning, Tide laundry soap, diet or natural supplements, the internet, clothes that are good looking but easily destroyed, and coats that are merely fashionable and hardly warm. Things that go way beyond simple need and into the realm of want.

Wouldn't the people of the 1800's laugh?

This was the goal after all. Education, food on the table, a roof over everyone's head, isn't that the reason behind every sacrifice the people of the 1800's made? They wanted their kids to have something better.

But the Great Depression was forever ago. This is a SLOW decline.

Between then and now, it's only three generations.

Didn't take long did it?

The kid with the Smartphone sadly thinks that even they, the one who cleans out pounds of rotten and moldy food every day in order to sell one good clean box so they could someday maybe afford an apartment of their own, even they don't know what it means to do without. The one whose job only lasts a season and doesn't know where the next job or the next paycheck will come from, even they don't know what it means to not have much.

Because this is the one generation that has learned to stay latched to their mother's breast until a certain future can be found and this is the only generation with parents who can afford to allow them to do just that.

It's what we were told to do since kindergarten. Grow up, get an education, get a job, and you'll have an absolutely certain and stable future with money, a roof, food, and possessions if you follow the right path and keep your nose clean. And if the future is uncertain, we've taught mom and dad to make a nest egg next to their retirement for you.

It all becomes a lie if there's a WWIII. Resources will become scarce. Money means nothing. Nobody can afford anything. Not even a loaf of bread.

So the kid begins to wonder, perhaps, America is just ready to review that lesson again? Maybe America will be destroyed before people can begin to handle the kind of lesson previous generations had to bear. They only survived because of God and good people. This generation that doesn't know what it means to do without will probably need a few years to adjust to the idea before they can calm down and even think about their neighbors, let alone God.

Who knows what will happen in the next year or where the next generation will be?

Only God.