A recent Zits comic strip featured the teenage boy named Jeremy sitting next to his mother thinking, “Our parents work their whole lives to make things better for us. Then when they succeed, they lecture us about how easy we have it.”

Meanwhile, his mother is seen saying, “Google?? We were lucky to have library cards.”

I agree with Jeremy’s mother; we were lucky to have a library card. We, of course, never complained about having to leave our homes to travel to a public building that had all the reference books and articles we needed for our knowledge. In fact, we were happy to walk up hill both ways in blinding snow to do it. Never once did we wish we had the information at the tip of our fingers.

If we remember correctly, we never thought there must be a better way to obtain information. Or, we never thought there must be an easier way to get around town, listen to music, watch a movie or have a phone conversation with someone.

Well, maybe thinking back, to be honest, we might have, could have, just possibly we may have thought during one of those blinding snow hikes, “there must be a better and easier way.” The trouble with all our thinking is that it produced some ideas. And with those ideas we developed technology that started to advance daily, and it transformed the everyday world around us.

In my personal history of 50 years, we went from listening to one song recorded on a 45 rpm disc spinning on a stationary turntable to listening to thousands of songs being played on hand-held, three-inch digital audio players. We began our research for term papers in libraries turning pages in hard covered bound encyclopedias to find one or two pages of information. Now, when we need clarification of a term to finish a five hundred word article, we stay in our seats and press a key to find 175,000 results for one minute detail.

With a cell phone situated in the palm of their hands, kids know what is happening when it is happening and see it happening without even being there. They simultaneously talk on a portable phone to one friend, while they send text messages, instant messages and e-mails to a number of other friends.

They owe all of this to us for wanting to make their lives easier and better. Jeremy’s point is well taken, and it is a point that has been handed down through the generations. Our parents wanted to make things better for us and when they accomplished it they threw up their hands and told us about their good old days and how lucky we have it. And I am sure their parents did the same thing. We can probably trace it back to a time when kids needed information they were lucky just to have symbols engraved on rock walls at their public caves.

I think when we see what our kids have in relation to what we grew up with we tend to get nostalgic. We forget we are the ones who thought about it and decided to change things. And it’s not like we parents are all using encyclopedias, rotary phones and listening to our scratched LPs. We have taken advantage of and bought all the new technology that also makes our lives easier and better.

But even so I can relate to Jeremy’s mother. I still have a library card, but I think I have to google it to find out exactly what and where it is.