As I have mentioned before, I am old. When I was a kid, I thought 20 was like really old and now I am quickly approaching 2 x 20. Not only that but I am married, have a child, and have no problem with driving a minivan.

But I have always believed that age is in your head. People act their age and it often has little to do with their chronological years.

What I have been noticing recently though is cultural age. And that cultural age has two groups, old and young, and those groups are moving further apart rather than closer together. At times it seems that we are on two different planets altogether.

This week we saw a big cultural-age phenomenon - the "mysterious package" debacle in Boston.

Before I talk about cultural age, I want to say a few things about hierarchy.

We Americans have this inherient belief (or fear) of hierarchy in our culture. All of our systems, businesses, government, even entertainment, are based on hierarchies. Hierarchy is everywhere and one of the basic principles of hierarcy is that the people higher up, know more. That is the whole idea, right? We think of ourselves as a meritocracy so the people who are higher up are higher up because they deserve to be. They get more power because they have more merit.

Thus, we look at President Bush and say: We should trust him because he must know more than us, he must know everything. After all he is the President! He is the decider for a reason. The same line of thinking would apply to a CEO like Bill Gates. BG runs a massive corporation; he must know everything about computers in order to be the top dog.

The problem is that we believe in this hierarchy thing even though we dont think about it much. When you actually do think about it, it starts to create some cognitive dissonance in our heads.

We believe in hierarchy but we also recognize the Peter Principle. How does that work? Moreover we all have personal experiences (often with bosses) that conflict with this meritocracy idea such that the whole thing starts to feel both illogical and clearly untrue. It is nice to think that President Bush got be President because he knew more than the rest of us but *cough* have you seen the Daily Show lately?

ATHF

Which brings us to this whole Aqua Teen Hunger Force debacle. I dont watch the show but I at least knew that ATHF was a cartoon. And I knew that Mooninites were characters, not explosives.

What makes this whole Mooninite-thing so interesting is that it clearly shows a problem with our hierarchy-thing. The top, the people in charge, knew all about terrorists and such but they clearly had no idea what ATHF was even though the bottom, young people, probably all did. The top has acted indignant and outraged; the bottom wonders what the big deal was.

Although this is kind of an isolated incident, I think it points to a larger social change, a culture-age gap. I have noticed for a while now: the "top" has less and less in common with the "bottom". And that distance is growing every year.

The culture gap is particularly noticeable with the nascent Internet culture. ZeFrank, Ask A Ninja, Lonely Girl 15. Ask anyone over 40 what these things are and I doubt many of them can tell you.

The social order is changing and you either get it or you have no idea it even exists. You can see the same thing in the Foley-page scandal and in parent-driven fears about chat rooms and Internet porn. The top seems completely naive and unable to make responsible decisions for the bottom.

Not only are behavior and forms of entertainment changing at an amazingly fast rate but the people at the top (parents, politicians, leaders) seem completely oblivious. Sometimes they know things are changing but they seem at a complete loss as to what is happening right in front of them.

Sometimes this is amusing or the butt of jokes (like Sen Steven's Internets tubes speech) but as we can see in Boston, not everyone is laughing. The young have always said the old dont understand them but this level of disconnect seems like something new. Or maybe I am just too young to appreciate it.