The wonders of the modern age continue to amaze — nonfat half & half for your coffee, cream without consequences (what’s next? safe sex?) — but the true miracle still is spring, which came late to us in Minnesota, in the frozen north, tucked in under Canada. Baseball season opened amid the chance of snow flurries. Cold dismal March weather lingered deep into April— weather that God designed to show people who don’t drink what a hangover is like — and then a classic spring day sprang up, warm, sunny, and the next morning, two inches of snow. The true Minnesotan ignored this. We are stoical at funerals, also at weddings, and endure grim weather without complaint, and also presidential politics.

In fact, Minnesota has contributed two Republican contenders this year, a suburban Congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, and a lackluster governor, Tim Pawlenty, both hewing to the party line, that corporations are suffering from over-regulation and high taxes and the less of both the better. This is the golden calf of Republicanism these days and it is pure nonsense: Business is booming, big corporations are earning truckloads of cash, and the average tax rate for the top 400 households in America, those earning $350 million per year or more, has dropped by more than a third and is less than the rate paid by the average taxpayer. One percent of America controls one-third of the wealth, which is reminiscent of czarist Russia. It is a good time to be very, very rich.

Here in St. Paul, Republicans have taken control of the state legislature and are marching to an old song — government is a blight on the land, urban America is the source of all evil — though everyone knows that the Internet, which enables conservative bloggers to heap abuse on Washington, was developed by the government, as was GPS, which will guide you through the twisting suburban streets to your country club; and so was Medicare, which has given awfully good health care to millions of conservatives. America is an urban culture — the rural young who flock to the cities certainly think so. But the conservatives are merchandising white anger and portraying our cautious and moderate president as a Marxist and Muslim, which is not going to succeed. Crackpots like Donald Trump and Congresswoman Bachmann are bursts of noise, amplified by the media, signifying nothing. Obama looks good for re-election, meanwhile the country is in for more partisan stupidity.

I live in St. Paul, in a neighborhood of Victorian houses, where homeowners were out in their yards as soon as the snow melted, fertilizing, raking, repairing the ravages of winter. Lawn work is a natural outlet for anger, raking especially, and when you walk down a street of well-kept lawns, you think of all the bile and violence that, instead of being expressed in blogs, got channeled into creating beautiful green turf and banks of hydrangeas and marigolds. Husbands and wives get furious at each other and instead of calling in the lawyers, they scratch scratch scratch the earth and hack hack hack out the dandelions.

A few blocks away in a coffee shop art students sit tapping at their laptops sending IMs while text messaging, listening to music on ear buds, updating Facebook pages, opening up videos on YouTube of cats walking into glass doors. Our young are growing up in a hyperinformation age in which we know everything and remember nothing, but they are all right with that. It’s the Montessori generation: Their nurturing teachers gave them prizes just for participation so they learned high self-regard early. Ritalin and Prozac were there to smooth out the harshness of adolescence and the Internet made possible a level of narcissism once enjoyed only by movie stars — everyone with his own Web site! Thousands of color photos of you, you, you! Your blog! A link to your dog’s Web site! Songs by your band, Degenerate Thrombosis! Hourly updates on your whereabouts, your thoughts, feelings, food intake, playlist, percentage of body fat. According to a Harris Interactive poll, 92 percent of the young want a “flexible work schedule” and 96 percent want a job that “requires creativity” and “allows me to have an impact on the world” — to which, an older person can only say, Good luck with that.

These are our children and we’ve given them a long adolescence, while they discover that the world does not really want them as creative artists, but as office workers. A painful discovery, but I detect no anger in them: They don’t blame the government for the fact that nobody wants their music. They sit talking their stuttery talk — “so she goes like, Huh? And he goes like, Yeah? And I’m going like, Whatever” — and they are O.K. with life in the Information Age.

I miss the America I grew up in, the land of the late-’40s and ’50s, where the guy at the Pure Oil station came out and filled up your tank and checked the oil and chatted about the weather and there weren’t safety seals on bottles of aspirin, vitamins, even shampoo — the idea of someone poisoning strangers was unknown (loved ones, yes, but not utter strangers) and there weren’t metal detectors at the county courthouse and nobody questioned that President Eisenhower was American, despite his German name. But I love my iPhone. I was riding the bus across town and clicked on the map icon and there was a satellite view of St. Paul and a blue dot representing the bus as it moved along University Avenue. I watched the little screen for miles; it gives you a beautiful illusion of power, satellites in the sky tracking the blue dot (that’s me!), though you’re only a passenger on this bus, same as the guy sleeping in the seat ahead of you. When you tire of the blue dot, you can beam onto YouTube and watch Chuck Berry sing “Back in the U.S.A.”

Back in the old America, when you rode the bus, you sat silent, looking out the window, thinking long thoughts such as “What will the future bring? What will I be when I’m grown up?” No need for that now. We’re here.