They see the world as it is and ask "why?" and imagine a different world and ask "why not?" George Bernard Shaw and Robert Kennedy asked these questions long ago, but young people today are asking them again.
It may seem as if science, medicine and common sense answered that question long ago.
Many outside Westminster will echo the ageing Duke of Wellington's question long ago and ask "Who?
For many readers and listeners who came of age during the 1960s, the question long ago turned on the contrast between Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs.
One was questioned three years ago about a plan to travel to Yemen and was the subject of an international arrest warrant.
"Myself, I spot-on asked him the question months ago," said the Rev. Michael Hopkins, president of Integrity, a gay and lesbian Episcopal group.
"Are you a mommy, or do you work?" The question, years ago, from my nursery-school-aged daughter to one of my friends, sent darts of hot regret through my working-mom gut.
" 'What-if' is just fantasy," Mr. Tashian said definitively, as if he had come to terms with the question long ago, and he seemed to speak for the band.
Burns might have answered the latter question long ago: "O thou, my muse!/guid auld Scotch drink!/Whether thro' wimplin worms thou jink,/Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink".
The Senate Intelligence Committee was supposed to answer that question years ago by comparing what officials claimed about Iraq — its missing weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's hyped ties with Al Qaeda — with what they knew.
