
I am occasionally asked to speak to young people at schools, from private to inner city, on career day, and sometimes the kids expectations of what my work entails is rather humorous. I guess after watching too many episodes of
CSI or
Without a Trace the real world of what I do seems pretty dull - "there I was. . . trapped. . . in a meeting!" For I have never chased a bad guy through a dark alley wearing 5 inch high heels and a blond wig, no one has ever shot at me or attempted to steal secrets from my briefcase (all they'd find was an autopsy report, an issue of Popular Mechanics and a Snickers bar) and unlike that girl in
Alias, I couldn't afford to live in a luxurious townhouse in the DC area on my salary.
Whatever the stories the kids want to hear about, I do stress one thing. That you don't have to be a rocket scientist or an heiress to pursue your dreams. It simply takes a lot of sweat and determination. I'm heartened by examples of hard work and sacrifice. One of my friends is a local teacher, and has had a few shining examples of students this last year, on their way to college on scholarships they earned and better things. I see though, with many of these kids I talk to, that too many of the next generation have this sense of entitlement that previous generations never had. Entitlement is a dry rot in the very fabric of our lives now. I don't blame the kids, I blame those that set the example, and too often that's society in general, coming from the highest level. When I was in high school, few of us drove to school, and if we did it was in the clapped out car we bought ourselves. Look at the high school parking lot now. $30,000 trucks, $25,000 SUV's, Lexus, BMW. Kids
expect that. It makes the job for the responsible parents and the teachers even harder, but there are times you have to say - put away the game boy, turn off the TV, shut off the Ipod and get the children down to business of earning it themselves.
Despite what certain political figures have said, the "American Dream" does not include having it handed to you. Liberty includes the freedom to go hungry some nights if you aren't willing to work for it. The chance of success also assumes the chance to fail.
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.- Thomas Paine
The sense of entitlement, the belief that we dominate global commerce and geopolitics and always will, ensuring a lifetime of goods and ease. . . . I see it way too much.

I know I'll take some flak for saying this, but I've seen too many people out there raising their kids with a sense that delayed gratification is a punishment, more intense than grounding them. There is a belief that children need to be wrapped in cotton padding so that they never stumble or fail. We all want our kids to be well and safe and happy, but raising them in an environment were nothing disappointing ever happens to them is doing the future great harm.
For as the economy changes, global conflicts escalate, as we are seeing as I write this, these kids are in for a rude and socially cataclysmic surprise. I consider myself very lucky. Had my parents offered me expensive electronic toys, $200 cell phones, laptops and cars and designer clothes, ski vacations and spring breaks on a beach somewhere while I shuffled along with a C average I probably would have taken them up on it. I WAS a teenager. But they didn't. I was expected do my best to make Honor Roll, to work, and put myself through school as they did in the generation past the depression. They taught me that life has its choices and many that you make will kill you. There was a sense of accountability, not entitlement. Did it make them Mr. and Mrs. Popular in the parenting depart?
Absolutely not. But it saved my life more than once, literally
and figuratively.
I put myself through graduate school flight instructing, a license I got after college when my geek gene was in high overdrive. I loved to fly, it looked like fun, it paid about twice what I could make working retail or other standard part time jobs. But what they don't explain when you're putting in the hundreds of hours of study it takes to be a Certified Flight Instructor is this. In this wondrous exchange are the frequent days that if mother nature isn't doing so, students will be actively trying to kill you. And smiling while doing it. Because the student hadn't yet learned that just because you weren't
yelling at him didn't mean you hadn't just avoided bent metal by nano-seconds. That would come after solo.
There was one fellow to whom I was demonstrating how to recover from a stall, the event where the angle between the chord line of the wing and the relative wind is such that airflow is disrupted and the wing stops flying. You practice it with some altitude beneath you and with regularity. It's one of the first things you learn and it's drilled into you from the beginning. The nose drops on it's own, you gently lower the nose, you level the wings and you add power. Piece of cake. Except in this case the student took my words "just gently lower the nose" to mean shoving the control yoke full forward with 180 pounds of push. I didn't know it would go that far forward. Forward, straight into the ground, coming up at 100 miles an hour.
For a moment, the woods below rushed up to greet us with a deathly slap, air rushing past with the speed of infallibility, mocking the effort of lift, the effort of life. But, for altitude and instincts born of hours of repetitive movements, that might have been our last flight. But it wasn't, and with a firm juggle of controls and the movement of the throttle we were climbing back up, with the power of an engine and the untended breath of youth. Inhaling life from death, not realizing just how close it was until it was over. In that moment I was reminded that nature did not care if we were young and high up on the food chain. The sky, with it's solitude and freedoms, creates a perfect stage for exultation or loss and we are very small actors in the arena.
With that, I grew up fast, and any reasoning I had that the world owed me a living was quickly dispelled when I realized that the world didn't even owe me life.I look at the work ethic of my parent's generation, and my grandparents. That is one of the things that has made our country successful. That the majority of us believe it is a privilege, to be allowed to work and earn money. Not a right because we're standing on U.S. soil, but a privilege of those citizens, who ask no favor or handout of anyone or anything save the chance to pit their talents and strengths and will against what the future can dish out.
I hope these kids can see that. That their dream will not be handed to them on a silver platter with a Platinum credit card. That they will struggle, and they will, at times, fail. My Dad had a sense of value for all that is earned and wanted to pass that on and I try to do my little part as well. Thoreau once said "
judge the cost of things in terms of how much life you had to expend to get it". So what I have managed to achieve has the greatest value to me.

I hope that in my show and tell items, the stories, and simply a ear to listen and share with them, that many of them, with so much to offer the country in skills and hope and heart will see a sense of that. That they will learn, with every challenge, be it emotional, rational or rhetorical, they will not look for something that was handed to them, they will look for something that is
within them. And with their dreams our nation will grow strong again.