Do I dare eat a peach?

Posted on July 20, 2002 in Reflections

In terms of age, I may be in the top 5% of all bloggers. Though it is becoming less rare to find people older than me as the InterNet seeps into the national consciousness, I often find myself talking to young adults old enough to be my children (if you claim to actually be one I demand the name of your mother and a DNA test before I start sending you Christmas presents) and some of them have children who would be my grandchildren. Fortunately, none of the third generation is old enough to chat, surf or blog. Yet.

Kelly Caldwell complained about growing old. Kelly sees signs about the date you have to have been born by to purchase alcohol and writes: “It’s simply not conceivable that I could have been enjoying life at junior high 21 years ago.” Wait a minute here. You mean you’re an adult who was in Junior High School when I was out in the world, scraping through graduate school, and voting? I wrote this in reply:

The big shock for me was when I started meeting people who did not remember when JFK died. It was a fine line, dividing me from people who were only a year or two younger than me. (I was five.) For me, one way to designate my peers was to ask them where they were when it happened. Those who replied “I don’t remember” or “I wasn’t born yet” put themselves in a different group.

It got worse as the years went on. Now that there are plenty of adults around who don’t remember the JFK shooting, I am not so shocked any more. The thing that gets to me now is that there are people alive who don’t remember the Vietnam War or are mystified by Richard Nixon’s resignation. You can tell that there has been a lot of spin doctoring going on, a definite change in the national mood of the young.