{"id":152,"date":"2006-02-12T08:31:40","date_gmt":"2006-02-12T13:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2006\/02\/12\/on-being-old\/"},"modified":"2006-02-12T11:42:47","modified_gmt":"2006-02-12T16:42:47","slug":"on-being-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2006\/02\/12\/on-being-old\/","title":{"rendered":"on being old&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"400\" vspace=\"5\" height=\"300\" border=\"1\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/snow2.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\">georgia on my mind&#8230;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">When I was a kid, I always had a sort of paradoxical reaction to old people. In the 60&#8217;s, the worst possible thing to be was &quot;over thirty&quot; &#8211; stodgy, conventional, scared, reactionary. Then, when we all started getting older, we just pushed the ceiling up to accomodate our aging &#8211; &quot;over forty&quot; and so on. But from my perspective, I liked the over sixty over seventy set. They didn&#8217;t have as much passion, tended to put things in context. They&#8217;d say, &quot;Yeah, I remember when F.D.R. blah blah.&quot; I liked that. There was a humility in old age that I envied. It&#8217;s easier to admit you&#8217;re wrong when you&#8217;re old&#8230; <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Well, now I am there, and I don&#8217;t feel so wise or as humble as I thought those old folks were. The only thing I do notice is that I don&#8217;t like silly fights that go on and on as much as I used to, like the one between the Washington Post&#8217;s Jim Brady\/Deborah Howell and the bloggers, noteably a favorite &#8211; Firedoglake. The &quot;Brady Bunch&quot; did a <strong>boo-boo<\/strong>, now a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2006\/02\/10\/AR2006021001914_pf.html\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"Washington Post\"><strong>boo-hoo<\/strong><\/a>. They fell for Republican &quot;spin&quot; and got called on it. I don&#8217;t know if they did it on purpose or it was something else. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">The &quot;something else&quot; would be like happened to every white male in North America in the seventies and eighties. No matter how hard one tried, or how hard you worked for the &quot;Cause,&quot; somebody was going to point out your unconscious racism or your male chauvinism on a nearly daily basis. The only defense possible was to memorize an increasingly complex lexicon of politically correct things to say, or retreat into a Sports Bar and lick your wounds, or listen [perish the thought] because many of the confrontations were true &#8211; even if they were driven be an equally powerful prejudice. Then you can come back and stay the course instead of whining forever in self-righteous obsolescence&#8230;  <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Brady and Howell got called on something, and it was a real something: Big-Time Spin, taken hook, line, and sinker. Their response was ultra-defensive. The attack reached &quot;yippie&quot; level, and Jim Brady is still explaining himself by attacking the entire blogsphere with all his might. It&#8217;s not pretty, and it&#8217;s boring. I&#8217;d suggest going to a Sports Bar for a while; licking your wounds until you get a little perspective; and coming back a little wiser [and a little older]. Right now, your attempts at defense prove your critic&#8217;s point in spades &#8211; even if some of your points are mildly correct. An &#8216;eye-for-an-eye&#8217; is rarely pretty [or effective]. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">It&#8217;s called losing, and it&#8217;s okay&#8230; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>georgia on my mind&#8230; When I was a kid, I always had a sort of paradoxical reaction to old people. In the 60&#8217;s, the worst possible thing to be was &quot;over thirty&quot; &#8211; stodgy, conventional, scared, reactionary. Then, when we all started getting older, we just pushed the ceiling up to accomodate our aging &#8211; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}