Open Letter to a Young Geek
When I was a kid, I was a nerd and a geek. I still am. Somewhere between the last time I got shoved into a locker and the time I founded a successful museum dedicated to comics, Geek became chic.
To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, “Geek, for lack of a better word, is good.”
Just think: an entire population of geeks, once mocked and humiliated, is now, dare I say it, popular.
As a geek, I owe a great deal to the generation before me, who boldly went where no one had gone before. Most of them went into computer software, entertainment and technology: Men like Bill Gates, who proudly wore those nerdy glasses, despite us all knowing full well he could afford to make a really cool Geordi La Forge Visor to correct his vision. Men who, as young boys, withstood the slings and arrows, the wedgies and wet willies of outrageous fortune, all the while knowing that some day — some day — that bully would be unable to find a job because he couldn’t figure out how to print up his resume due to a glitch in the operating system they created.
Remember the kid in the 50’s who worked a paper route just to have a few dimes to buy comic books every Wednesday? Turns out he kept those comic books — and his Amazing Fantasy number 15 with Spiderman’s debut just went for a quarter of a million bucks.
Somewhere along the way, geek became hip. Nerds are now cool.
Dogs and cats living in peace! Mass hysteria! That trivia-spouting, tricorder-wielding, comic con-attending geek is now the driving force behind media empires. With a simple tweet of “worst comic book adaptation ever,” he can bring down mighty studios and change the landscape of your summer movie schedule. If he doesn’t like an outfit or an actor, he can wield his power like Thor’s hammer.
Look around you: black plastic rim glasses are the top seller, and I am pretty sure most of these people have 20/20 vision. Comic cons are filled with supermodel geek girls wearing t-shirts that say “I love nerds!” (Where were you 20 years ago?)
Comic artists have fans lined up stretching from one end of a convention center to the other. Our technology, our gaming, our entertainment, our movies, all those products with the letter I in front of them, are produced by a bunch of nerds. They should make a movie about it! Call it “the Revenge of the something …” Sorry, I’m not good at movie titles.
Geeks have taken a label and turned it into a badge of honor. No surprise — the best PR guys are all geeks too. It’s a remarkable and wonderful feat with an important message to young people. That message is: take pride in your label. We have turned a stigma into status. The brightest, the richest, and the most creative were just like you.
We know how painful and how tough it is to be bullied and insulted. But take comfort, my young Padawan: walk alone you do not though much fear I sense in you.
We are with you. We have jobs waiting for you when you get out of CMU and MIT. There are great comics you will write, video games you will design, and entire virtual worlds to make into a reality.
It is hard, I know. You may not have a date to the prom, but take comfort: By the time your 20-year reunion rolls around, the school will be named after you. You won’t all grow up to be a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But you don’t have to. Follow your own star, whether that star be Trek or Wars.
In the not too distant future there will be a jock in a varsity jacket pounding his fist on a beach, yelling “damn you, damn you all to hell,” as he realizes his time has come and gone, and the nerds now rule the earth.
The geeks who have gone before you have done great things and blazed a path that instills respect and admiration from those around you, so wear that pocket protector and hold your head up high!
My son told me the other day. “Daddy, one of the kids at school called me a geek.” I asked him, how did it make him feel? He replied, “Proud.” And that made me proud, too.
For the Geek shall inherit the earth.
(This article also formed the basis for the author’s 2011 commencement speech to Oakbridge Academy of Arts in New Kensington.)
