disrespect for age – Lee Duigon

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We had another frustrating trip to the supermarket today. Now they’ve got these arrows taped to the floor, and you’re supposed to follow them. If you actually did that, it would take three or four times as long to buy your groceries, thanks to the need for constantly having to change your plans because of shortages.

So I was going the “wrong” way down the aisle, because what I wanted to buy was out of supply and I had to back up and look for a substitute, when some woman came along and sneered, “Hey, what about the arrows–old man?” This was so fantastically rude that I lost my temper and replied in Anglo-Saxon. She answered in kind.

I guess my grey hairs were showing, and somehow that gave her an entitlement to insult me. “Old.” As in stupid. As in worthy of disrespect. What do you want to bet, though, she’s going to vote for Joe Biden, who’s older than me and almost completely potty?

Oh, let’s all be good little soviets and follow the arrows on the floor!

No thanks. Bad enough we have to wear the masks and can’t buy rubbing alcohol. We don’t have to encourage tinpot tyrants.

Image result for Girls with Half Shaved Heads

A reader this morning remarked, speaking, I take it, to the rest of us, “You all seem as if you’re 70 years old.” As if being 70 were a bad thing. “Sometimes a haircut is just a haircut”–referring to someone going around with half his or her head shaved–“and it means nothing except style.”

As far as I can see, those who adopt this style are imitating certain Grade B celebrities that I never heard of. To go to this much trouble is to be making some kind of statement. It may be as simple a statement as “I am an idiot,” or it may be something as profound as “I are a Intyerllectural and i re-ject yore stopid borzoueis socile confentions!”

It used to be that being 70 years old entitled you to a modicum of respect, owing to the experience one accumulates over the course of seven decades.

Speaking only for myself, I do try very hard not to move with the times, because the times are evil and increasingly insane. If it seems to me that a lot of people are going out of their way to look ugly, it’s because a lot of people are going out of their way to look ugly.

Yes, I know–my father, in the 1960s, worried about young people turning into “the bell-bottom type,” although he himself wore bell-bottoms for a couple of years: in the Navy. When he volunteered to serve his country, at risk of life and limb. But I was 18 and I could only laugh at him. What a fool I was!

Now I’m the one who’s pushing 70, and I can look back over the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 17 years of a new century–and see how far we’ve slid down the pipe.

I am proud of my grey hairs. I think I’ve earned them. And I’ve earned the right, by looking back on my own damned foolishness, to say that a society that thinks the shorter a time you’ve lived, the wiser you must be, is headed for a real hard time.