Due to lack of interest...
The Yosemite chronicles are indefinitely postponed. After half a dozen posts without a pixel of interest, I have to think either the topic really is boring or I've lost my touch as a writer. So onward to other thoughts.
During that recent trip, Em expressed dismay at a news poll indicating a large percentage of "people over 65" support Romney and the policies of the Romney-Ryan ticket. She seized on me as the nearest and most accessible representative of people over 65. My response was lame, and we got stuck on one of my favourite arguments: there are many more stupid people than smart people, and becoming older doesn't make you smarter. Therefore, stupid young people become stupid old people, if their stupidity doesn't kill them prematurely.
I'm groping toward a broader explanation. One dimension of this is that "over 65" as a dividing point would already be irrelevant if the more simple-minded form of journalist didn't insist on hanging so many stories on the same old hook. Age 65 is the a default retirement age, based on its initial use by Social Security, only if you're 75 or older. That transition has been going on for nearly a generation, a detail the shallow end of the news pool has long overlooked. I know and like a good many people 75 or older but I don't feel an automatic unanimity of interest with them. More, I can sense a different worldview among people only three or four years older than I.
I think easily of several such people who were college seniors when I was a freshman. They were away, out in the world in one fashion or another, when the maelstrom of social change we lazily call "the Sixties" burst upon the country. Some people change their values with changing times, but most I think do not. I find that people aged 68 to 74 are more likely to share weltanschauung than people bridging that dated 65 threshold. Having been around when those older values were common currency, I can't be surprised when those values include such things as sexism, racism, and McCarthyesque Red Scare paranoia. I suggest those are the building blocks of what passes for thought among American reactionaries. The pressure of later ideas may have sanded the rough edges off those views in some cases, but their shape remains evident.
If we are a stew of nature and nurture, we must include the influence of our times under nurture. What we do with those threads is what differs.
During that recent trip, Em expressed dismay at a news poll indicating a large percentage of "people over 65" support Romney and the policies of the Romney-Ryan ticket. She seized on me as the nearest and most accessible representative of people over 65. My response was lame, and we got stuck on one of my favourite arguments: there are many more stupid people than smart people, and becoming older doesn't make you smarter. Therefore, stupid young people become stupid old people, if their stupidity doesn't kill them prematurely.
I'm groping toward a broader explanation. One dimension of this is that "over 65" as a dividing point would already be irrelevant if the more simple-minded form of journalist didn't insist on hanging so many stories on the same old hook. Age 65 is the a default retirement age, based on its initial use by Social Security, only if you're 75 or older. That transition has been going on for nearly a generation, a detail the shallow end of the news pool has long overlooked. I know and like a good many people 75 or older but I don't feel an automatic unanimity of interest with them. More, I can sense a different worldview among people only three or four years older than I.
I think easily of several such people who were college seniors when I was a freshman. They were away, out in the world in one fashion or another, when the maelstrom of social change we lazily call "the Sixties" burst upon the country. Some people change their values with changing times, but most I think do not. I find that people aged 68 to 74 are more likely to share weltanschauung than people bridging that dated 65 threshold. Having been around when those older values were common currency, I can't be surprised when those values include such things as sexism, racism, and McCarthyesque Red Scare paranoia. I suggest those are the building blocks of what passes for thought among American reactionaries. The pressure of later ideas may have sanded the rough edges off those views in some cases, but their shape remains evident.
If we are a stew of nature and nurture, we must include the influence of our times under nurture. What we do with those threads is what differs.
Labels: Age 65, behavior, media criticism, polls
posted by Uncle | 00:00
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