GENERATIONS: Response to Fleming

Your ageist outlook is fairly sad. Wisdom is where you find it, and the more youthful these days seem to have more trouble adding, spelling of knowing basic things, current and historical. 

I don’t know your age, but I am approaching the 3/4 century mark. The idea such as myself should hand off the reins to younger people because they don’t like us and think we are too old to have any use is puerile and self-indulgent.  

I had that attitude for a time in my youth until I started learning how little in fact I know, often at the hands of older people but nowhere near always. The longer I lived, the more I found wisdom in many places.  Male, female, younger, peer and older. Foreigners and Americans. In a village in rural El Salvador.  

Your focus on age rather than specific issues sounds more like the current fad of the “OK Boomer” dismissal rather than thoughtful discourse. Such discourse is much more difficult than current fads and emotions, and more risky because you may say something stupid and get schooled for it, losing your facade of superiority.  

If you have concrete proposals for change, make them. If you don’t or can’t, figure out how to do so. Or remain irrelevant and call attention to it by whining.

G.H. SCHIRTZINGER

Hayden