You're old

The Beloit College's annual Mindset List is out!

For those of you not familiar with this list, it is a snapshot of how this year’s college freshmen (The class of 2012) view the world. It is a list filled with items like this:

7. Gas stations have never fixed flats, but most serve cappuccino.

19. Films have never been X rated, only NC-17.

This list is supposed to give us in the media a better understanding of youth culture. What it really does is make everyone feel freaking old. It tells you that everything you thought was current is old-school and everything you thought was retro is ancient fucking history.

It also believes that the new freshmen are a bunch of illiterate morons. It assumes that they know nothing about the world the existed before they were born. Come on! They’re college students! I assume a few of them might have read a book or watched an old movie. (I have never seen a piece of fly paper in my life, but I know what it is thanks to its use as a gag in about a hundred Little Rascals’ films.)

But this year’s list has a very curious item, and it’s right at the top:

1. Harry Potter could be a classmate, playing on their Quidditch team.

Uh, no he couldn’t. He’s a fictional character. I don’t care how young you are, you’re not going to be spending the next semester flying around on a broom chasing snitches and looking out for Voldemort.

So read the list and email it to your friends. But keep in mind that a large group of people is a messy, gooey blob that cannot be easily summed up in a list of 60 items.

On the other hand, you may want to rethink that ad making fun of Gorbechov’s birthmark.

The complete list is here.