Respect Your Elders

We are instructed to respect our elders at a very young age, and that message is repeated all throughout our lives, but, coming from an upbringing where my father was constantly verbally abusive of both me and my family, I have always taken that advice with a grain of salt. These days, I do not even have to look back to abusive behavior of my often violent father, I can simply at the world around me to see that the old folks do not know how to run a society all that well. Our elderly resident Donald Trump is now toying with the idea of fifty year mortgages to fix the housing crisis, an idea which, to be honest, is better than nothing, but is not something that will ever lead to home ownership for most folks. I guess maybe their kids may own that home in their forties, but is that really the best we can do. I have to leave my kid a home that can claim ownership of at thirty five. That is just the beginning, of course. Our judicial, legislative and executive branches of government are filled with old timers. Chuck Grassley is actually in his nineties, which, I am sorry, is just crazy no matter how you slice it. Nancy Pelosi just retired from government in her eighties. Mitch McConell is still stumbling onto the senate floor when he is clearly no longer fit to do the job. Our not so supreme court has a median age of like sixty five. I could keep going but you get the point and you have likely noticed what I am saying yourself, but the term ageist came into favor a while back so you have likely been too afraid to say something about it. There have been times when I have felt awkward criticizing the age of others and their ability to get the job done, and I still would if the country were heading the right direction, but the evidence clearly shows that it is not. Socialism is rising in popularity because inflation is out of control. Small businesses are becoming liabilities, not investments, as our elders lace their faith in outdated economic policies like tariffs which make it even more difficult for small companies to compete with conglomerates. Tariffs literally caused the great depression, but these old fogies are thinking it will work this time. Folks are lined up at food banks because the old guys still think that you can just save for a few weeks and afford groceries and a car and a house. Diseases that were once thought extinct are now coming back in fashion because the very old and very crazy RFK Jr. has informed everyone that being healthy means bathing in raw sewage and doing heroin after sitting in the sun for hours on end. We are literally being led into a new dark age and all the folks in charge are old. There was a time, believe it or not, when respect was earned, not freely given because the bible told us that was a good thing to do. If all you get from respecting someone is a ridiculous society that has no real way of sustaining itself, then I struggle to understand why I should have any respect at all for such people. You cannot keep expecting everyone to follow such outdated concepts when al they get for it is heartache and suffering. There has to be some kind of payoff beyond just feeling good about yourself for a few minutes. But even if you get beyond the state the world is in, even if you put out of mind the fact that boomers essentially lived like kings their whole lives and now have told everyone else that they should be content to live in scarcity, there is still just the fact that sometimes older people are just...mean. My father was case study in this. He was always and mean old man. I think he may have been born that way. was no reason for him to yell at me every single day of my formative. I cannot remember one day where that man did not yell at or ridicule me. He was also a drunk and his drunkenness led him to threaten to murder my mom with a rifle he kept in his closet one night. I tell that folks who I get in a discussion with about this concept and they are shocked and horrified now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.