Shine on You Crazy Kids

I remember my return to Iceland in summertime after my first year spent abroad in the United States. I arrived in the middle of July and I must confess that I was amazed by the long days. Where did all this light come from? Why isn't the sun going down, it is 10 p.m. for crying out loud? What on earth is going on? Spending only one year away had made me forget all about the 24 years of bright summer nights I have under my belt. So I can only imagine how it is experiencing the everlasting days as someone who has lived their whole life with the sun setting at a normal hour. It felt great getting these extra hours of daylight. Perhaps it was because for the first time I could enjoy guilt-free staying up late since I didn't have to go to work the following day. I had never really taken a proper vacation in Iceland before. Like most

youngsters I worked during the summer and only took time off to go

abroad.If you are lucky enough to experience Iceland in the summertime be sure to make the most of the long days. Go hiking at night, play golf

after midnight and be sure to stay up long enough to catch the sun

setting on Reykjavik harbor.

Other things amazed me when I came back. How come everybody is so darn cool? Walking down Laugarvegur, the main drag in Reykjavik, you see a great number of dazzling young hipsters, wearing one of a kind clothing, definitely too cool for school. Not even Williamsburg, Brooklyn sports a higher freak to geek ratio. I will go out on a limb here and share an idea I have about why this is.

Growing up as a kid in Iceland my friends and I had a lot of time on our hands as youngsters normally do. With all this free time and basically nothing to do we had to create our own world. Our minds had the chance to wander around without grown-ups leading the way. The childhoods of most of my American friends seem to have been quite different. In the land of freedom smart people with money on their minds found out that even penniless kids can be big consumers. Big corporations created consumer products aimed at children. Bombarding kids with direct and indirect advertisements made the companies' products necessary for social acceptability. One's childhood was ruined if it didn't include a trip to Disneyland, eating regularly at Mc Donald's and watching MTV for hours each day. Hence the average American teenager followed a path laid out by big business. This path (or highway would be a better name) was created for the masses and it succeeded, taking the majority of Americans along for the ride. If you talk to twenty-somethings in America they have experienced similar things: they have watched the same Hollywood TV shows, eaten at the same handful of fast-food restaurant chains and shopped their wardrobes in either K- or Wal-mart. Mass media have a stranglehold on how Americans think and consumerism drives society. This pattern of behavior follows people throughout life. This results in a relatively homogenous society: on the whole, people dress the same and there is little creativity in lifestyle. People are used to being fed from the meager corporate menu and they don't seem to mind the taste. In Iceland we spent our youth in nature instead of the shopping mall and playing outside rather than watching TV. (The one TV station in Iceland when I was growing up didn't even broadcast on Thursdays.) I think this might play a part in our nation's formation of strong individuals.

To you Icelanders I say: come spend some time in the suburban U.S. and see what fertile imaginations and uniqueness we possess; if nothing more, we tend to at least dress a little bit differently than one's next-door neighbor. To the rest of the world: come visit Iceland and meet the crazy kids. I believe that the degree of corporate influence in the U.S. and Iceland accounts for these differing levels of individuality within society.

I am afraid things might be changing for today's Icelandic youth. In recent years Iceland has become quite Americanized. Shopping malls continue to pop up all around, fewer and fewer green spaces can be found in Reykjavik, fast food is on the rise and soon there will be more cars on the streets than people to drive them. How will this affect future generations and Icelandic culture at large? Lets hope this change in Icelandic society won't have a homogenizing effect on today's kids and that future generations will keep on rocking this world.

Baldur Héðinsson is a mathematics student and DJ living in Boston