One Generation

I work in a secure minimum adult male institution in the State of Wisconsin.  It is secure because there is an electric fence that prevents the inmates from walking away from the institution.  I supervise an inmate that works as a clerk in my office.  Today we were speaking about fresh produce being grown on the rooftops of urban buildings in America. He had seen this activity on PBS, his window to a world outside the electric fence, a world he remembers from a long time ago.   He thinks that most Americans eat food that comes out of a cardboard box.  He is right.  He thought of his grandmother who used to grow vegetables in her garden.  We spoke about the fact that in only one generation in America, the culture of growing our own food has disappeared and been replaced by purchasing processed food, high in sodium, fat and cost.  We continued to speak about the other cultural changes that have happened in just that one generation.  He wondered about the people who no longer know their native languages, who hadn’t passed that knowledge to the younger generation.  We spoke about the knowledge that used to be transferred orally from generation to generation… the knowledge of how to build ships that could cross the oceans or the knowledge of the stars that could guide those same ships…He wondered about the new technologies, and the practice of the younger generations who know only about depending on that technology, who know nothing of the skills that previous generations knew, those same people who developed those technologies and think nothing of depending on them for their futures, for their survivals.  We spoke of this younger generation as though we were so much older, so far removed from them, so unfamiliar with their experience.  My clerk is not an old man and neither am I.  He is only 40 years old.   I am 57.  We spoke of so many different topics today.  Life is short.  And so it was another day on the hill.