There was one small slight little fly in the ointment of our wonderful opening ceremony. The USHPA representative took it upon himself to take advantage of the situation (he was there to welcome the competitors on the part of the USHPA to the Worlds) to call upon the competitors (as leaders of the hang gliding community) to save hang gliding from extinction. He lamented that the growth is negative in hang gliding and that we needed to do something about it as we (that is the competition pilots) are the leaders of the hang gliding community in each country. 

All well and good, but he prefaced this call to action with his diagnosis of the cause of this woeful situation. I'm not kidding when he stated that the problem was "these kids today." These kids don't want to walk up a training hill a hundred times. He went on and on about his grandfather and his father during the depression and how his father made sure his son worked and how he can't get anyone to work for him in his factory. "These kids today."

The last time I checked the problem with America is that we work too much. That you can't get anyone to take a vacation. That they are addicted to their Crackberries. No wonder that they are not out there on the training hill. Who has time for that?

Okay, my diagnosis is no less a stereotype built on flimsy evidence and lazy thinking than that presented by the speaker in the name of the USHPA. Thankfully, while it was fully twice as long as any other speaker's presentation, it was short (if not sweet).

People, if you want to have a diagnosis of the World's troubles and you want to take up other people's valuable time, I suggest that you have to do a lot more than rant about the problems of hiring kids at your factory. It requires thinking and hard thinking at that. I covered my head during the presentation and hoped that our international guests would not see this boorish behavior by our representative (the representative of an organization that had almost nothing to do with our effort to secure and actually put on the Worlds) as reflecting on the rest of us.

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