One of the biggest shockers for me is the names kids have these days. I noticed it when I started substitute teaching about a year ago. Often I am unable to pronounce correctly a single name from the roll. Some are real shockers: I had a girl named “Latrine” on one class. :eek: And even traditional names are being spelled in every tortured way (“Synthia”, “Aimi”), also the proliferation of “stripper” names like “Destiny” and “Bambi”.
I don’t have a TV (quite seriously), so forgive my ignorance. Also, I’m in Canada, so we have MuchMusic instead, though I’m fairly certain it’s possible to get MTV as well. What is it about these days, if not music videos?
Bambi’s a boy’s name!
Reality shows and celebrity worship.
Oh, here’s one: the proliferation of different types of food. I remember when balsamic vinegar, goat cheese, and pomegranates, for example, were all extremely fancy; frankly Dijon mustard was about as crazy as we were likely to get. Fair trade coffee? What’s that? Now they’re staple products at my local supermarket, and my area is far from ritzy.
Another vote for the rise of the Latino culture.
I live in central Michigan, and have probably been out of the state for all of a week total in my entire life. I don’t think I have ever met anyone of Latino origin (or at least, anyone who obviously was). We’re about 90% white and 10% black around here.
But it seems like TV, radio, all kinds of media are pulling out all the stops to bring in this invisible demographic. I was watching PBS and they had some cartoon that spoke half Spanish and half English. I suppose it is supposed to be educational to children. This seems odd to me, as I was always raised that English was our national language and people who moved here would learn English. Unless you intend to move to Spain or Mexico, there would be no reason to learn Spanish. I mean, I wouldn’t move to China without first learning Chinese, because that would be rude.
Note I don’t mean to sound offensive or racist or anything in the above paragraph. I’m just… perplexed I guess.
I’m 23 years old and I feel very behind the times.
Heck, I’m only 20 and that’s a (pleasant) surprise to me too. Of course, I have a different perspective on this, living in San Diego–where Mexican and American culture are probably more interwoven than anywhere else. But I went to grade school in the DC area in the early 90s, when there was no real chicano population to speak of there, and my contemporaries took French. By the time I moved here in 1997, the idea of making Spanish-speaking children take classes in English was becoming controversial in this county. Ten years later, I can exchange pleasantries in Spanish with almost everyone I know, even if they don’t have a drop of Hispanic blood in them.
What amazes me is that popular culture didn’t acknowledge the presence of the Mexican-American/chicano demographic earlier, outside of stereotypical portrayals in the movies. There have been Mexicans in Hollywood since before the Civil War, fercrissakes. If you think about it, the entertainment industry actively ignored Mexican-American culture for decades. If anything, we should be shocked that we didn’t see the integration coming.
FWIW, at the very least it’s still a major pain in the ass to call home from overseas (Israel, at least). That said, my cellphone has an area code from another state, and nobody bats an eye at getting a call from it.
My high school (I was Class of '04) was the same way, and I was a member of our GSA; but unfortunately that’s not the case everywhere. You don’t have to go 30 miles east of my high school to find the one where a kid found a dead cat and a burning cross on his lawn the morning after he founded his school’s GSA.
That said, I’m glad to know there’s a high level of acceptance somewhere in suburban Chicago, and not just in (almost downtown) San Diego.
Did engineering students drink like fish back then?
I’d be surprised to find out that many New Yorkers have ever eaten chicken-fried steak. Actually, I’m surprised to hear that it’s considered “regional” cuisine there.
That one shocks me too! I can’t watch MTV or VH1 anymore, because I can’t wrap my head around the fact that there’s no actual music.
Invisible to you, maybe–you live in Michigan. I don’t think I know anybody except my parents who eats more ketchup than salsa.
I don’t know where in Michigan Captain_C lives, but Hispanics are definitely not invisible throughout the whole state: I had a summer job in south-west Michigan a couple years ago, and we had to hire extra Spanish-speaking staff to cater to the local Hispanic population.
It is amazing. I call my parents in Arkansas from Japan all the time; it costs 6 cents a minute. The connection is immediate and clear as a bell, most of the time. It’s fantastic.
I, too, find it strange that no one (except my family) drinks tap water anymore. Why are people willing to pay such exorbanite prices for bottled water? I honestly cannot taste the difference in the places I’ve lived. I do like to have water with me, though, when I remember to bring a bottle filled with tap water from home.
I’m a lot younger than you, but even I remember my childhood in the early 90s when New York City was thought of by a lot of people as an extremely scary, dark and evil place. Re-watching childhood movies like Adventures in Babysitting and Home Alone 2, and older action movies like Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra, I notice the cities are made to look like dungeons: dark alleys with steam everywhere, dilapidated or under-construction buildings all over the place, proto-barbaric gangs roaming around. And I remember people talking about New York and Chicago as places where you were guaranteed to be mugged or assaulted. I don’t hear much talk like that anymore, or see such negative portrayals of big cities, so I think your assessment is right on the money.
I think that might be the place, I remember one of the kids had mac and cheese for dinner.
Oh god yes, and the faculty did too.
I bought one in 1973 and it still works!
I just learned from this thread that there are car seats for eight-year-olds. I’m thirty and childless, and I think the idea of a normal, non-developmentally delayed eight-year-old in a car seat sounds utterly bizarre.
This definitely depends on where you live. I’m your age, and it wasn’t uncommon to see Mexicans and hear Spanish in the NY farming area I grew up in. This wasn’t a diverse place either. The difference is, around 1996 or so, they started staying for good instead of relocating after farming season was over.
This might be another regional thing, but I’m surprised to see the change in what it means to be a responsible pet owner. When I was a kid, it was okay for your dog to live outside, and if you went on vacation, you’d just ask a friend to check on him. Now some people don’t even let their pets go into a secure yard alone, and drop them off at a kennel or sitter if they go out of town (or they take the pet on vacation too). There’s also a huge amount of toys, strollers, videos (!) and all kinds of other stuff that are meant to be used by pets.
With regard to the GSA stuff matt_mcl and fetus posted, as I said, unfortunately there’s still plenty enough bigotry to go around. However, it is now Officially Not Cool for these things to happen. When I was a kid, it was truly acceptable for gay (or suspected gay) students to be shunned or attacked.
A boy I went to school with was very good-looking, had a slight lisp and was not into sports. He was constantly and consisently abused by other students and even by teachers (one teacher referred to him as “you - girly man there.”) When his parents came to the school to complain about the treatment he was receiving, the principal told them, “It’s his own fault. If he wouldn’t act like that, people would leave him alone.”
When my daughter told me that one of her friends was gay, she delivered this news with all the drama she would use to tell me so-and-so’s favorite color was blue. It was an incidental anecdote, hardly worth her mentioning at all. THAT mindset, that being gay was merely one aspect of a person’s makeup, floored me. I was active in HS and college in various gay-rights organizations, and again, though reprehensible things still do happen, I can’t help but feel that we have made enormous, tremendously gratifying strides.
The one that caught me most by surprise is satellite televesion. I was in my late teens in East Texas when the big dishes hit the market. The price tag was $3500 - $4000. I thought there was no way people would pay that much just to watch television. Now, bear in mind that this rural area had one TV channel available up until that point. I vaguely remember when we didn’t even have a television. At the time, you could still buy most cars for under $10000.
Boy was I wrong. I bet within two years, over half the households had dishes. A lot of those people had no business spending that much money on entertainment. We didn’t get one, but the parents of a friend did. Several of us teenage boys found execuses to be at his house on Saturday night to watch movies with naked women in them on HBO.
On one hand, it was a good change. It gave people, especially children, a window to the world that didn’t exist before.
On the other hand, the programming content sure did sink to the lowest common denominator really quick.
Re: Spanish and Hispanic culture…
I checked in on the website of my old high school in Whitby, Ontario, and was interested to discover that the third language offered there was Spanish. (The second language, mandatory, was of course French.) When I was a student there (I976-1981), it was German.
I don’t know what the tap water is like in Okinawa or Arkansas, but I’d rather drink Drano than the city water here. It’d probably be safer, too. See Union-Tribune article calling the system “substandard”. The water that comes out of my tap isn’t even completely transparent.
Seems to me like most people in the world still think of NYC as a scary, dark and evil place. And when I moved to San Diego in the mid-90s, my classmates warned me that “people over there shoot you if you interrupt them”. My best guess is that that image came by association with LA, which they knew primarily through gangster rap.
Similarly, the idea of putting kids on leashes and harnesses blows my mind. The fact that such sheer dehumanization comes out of such good intentions is totally weird to me.
Spanish lessons. At least for me. I LOVE making that commute COUNT.
Sorry, this was a little unclear. I was referring to when I told my classmates in Maryland that I was moving to San Diego.
Open ignorance, maybe even intolerance, of science. When I was in middle school and for the first few years of high school (I graduated in 1995), “evolution” was not a dirty word and the scientific method was taught. Now, my ten year-old nephew is taught that evolution is “only a theory” and that all research is flawed.
I’ll add my voice to the normalization of being homosexual as a change for the positive. In High School, I didn’t date, I didn’t belong to any of the major churches, so I was gay and was treated like shit because of it. Sadly, my nephew is being educated by this same school district. 