--- In [email protected], Bronte Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Great post. When I was a young girl, I thought my generation > was superior because our beliefs and ideas weren't all boxed > in like our parents'. We were willing to question basic > assumptions -- like democracy, Christianity, the purpose of > life -- and often come up with new, fresh answers. That made > my peers exciting and -- sometimes, to me -- heroic. Now that > I'm older, it ain't quite the same. My generation has become > the parents, and grandparents. People who used to be so avant- > guarde often now seem stodgy in their thinking, unwilling to > keep growing and learning. As a generation, we've turned the > fresh ideas of our youth into irrefutable systems. Our minds > can be as closed as the very adults we once rebelled against > -- for their close-mindedness! But when questioning, learning, > growing and living remain core values, as they do for some > people, aging doesn't have to happen. Such older folks are > looked up to by the young, who hope that's the kind of person > they themselves will mellow to become someday. - Bronte
Or at least they hope to. And, let's face it, that hope is not often nurtured by the adults they see around them. Their parents, their grandparents, their uncles and aunts, their teachers, the adults they see in the offices they have to go into to get a driver's license or sign up for the next semes- ter at school...who among them would they want to *be like* when they grow up? Right? It's very, very rare for a young person in the last few generations to actually *meet* an older person they'd want to be like, or that they would even find interesting. That's what I hear over and over and over and over from some of these young folks who deign to talk to me. I think they talk to me because I'm weird as shit, and at my age. And that *interests* them, IMO partly because they've met so few people in their lives my age who *were* still weird. Most of them had been "tamed." Youth doesn't want to believe it will ever be tamed. And damn!...good for them. If I were a rah-rah-gotta-find-a-way-to-pitch- my-spiritual-path-or-guru-to-others-at-every- opportunity type, I'd probably attribute my enduring weirdness to a lifetime of meditation. But since I have no particular path or guru or even style of meditation to pitch, I'll attribute it to LSD. All that acid I took in the late 60s dissolved the parts of my brain that are suscept- ible to being tamed. :-)
